As long at you are under 100metres , just run cables. Run the outdoor Cat6a variety, or lay regualr in conduit, Dont run just one, run two (One for now and one for later/if something breaks.)

You can buy other point to point wireless netwoking devices as suggested below, but these will all add more power use and complexity as they are a little specialised to get working well.

Cat6a will allow you many years of cheap and reliable service and will be cheper in the long run unless you’ve got some really difficult terrain to work with.

You could also run Multi Mode fibre optic cable up to 550m with 2 cheap swiches that have an SPF port at either end. This will cost a little more, but willgive you near unlimited expansion

Oh, and another thing, make sure you dont have any security settings with your browser that can impede the CFE website on the router. Brave is good at breaking this sort of thing. Turn the router OFF for a full minute or two and disconnect power before you start the process of entering recovery mode, we need that NVRAM free of junk from the broken upload.

If you miss getting the router into recovery mode on the first try due to timing, disconnect power and wait again before starting over. This sounds odd, but a lot of junk can stay in RAM for quite a while after power off, and youre last firmware is broken so we dont know how thats going to impact.

sorry, I gave you a link but this one is better:

https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-AC88U

I forgot to mention, theres actually a whole underworld of router hardware hackers out there (me included) who add custom firmware to these consumer devices - and thus never have these issues. Ever.

A part of hacking router hardware means somtimes “alternative” ways uploading unbricking are needed, and the bwlow link is one such example. Asus routers looks like they all use a simple TFP recovery mode which wont specifically need the Asus recovery app, (which is prob rubbish anyway), you just need a TFP server and the right sequence and timing of upload.

Here is a hacker’s recovery method for a similar model… Asus are likely all the same.

https://forum.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=1208723

Manual unbricking should be faily straight forward if you pay attention to those steps. They should also map to what the recovery app is trying to do as well, jst without the flakiness.

On a side note, these Asus models look like more security and stability hassles than they are worth OMG Asus firwares have broken so many motherboard and routers this year. Next time, buy somthing compatible with DDWRT (easy) or OpenWRT (adavnced) firmware. This always means avoiding routers with Broadcom based chipsets. Confirm future purchases with these links and play… you’ll never look back…

https://openwrt.org/toh/start

https://dd-wrt.com/support/router-database/

I’m an old datacentre guy, so please take note.

You should aim for zero public IP exposure to services. It is not good what you’ve got there.

If all those hosts are on public IPs and your’e not really in control of any upstream device to manage network traffic to them if you do this - you are at the whim of your provider.

How are you going to centrally authenticate and manage/monitor all this? You’re missing some sort of gateway that YOU control. You’ve actually drawn up a honeypot for hackers.

Please run your own virutal firewall at least, and cofigure the vswitches accordingly in layers and microsegment separate each service so one compromised system does not give over the whole network. Setup VLANs to allow for this sort of flexibility (and future flexibilty).

Depending on how may public IPS you have, consider putting everthing behind NAT or PAT. Make a separate netowork just to access the VMware kit and secure this, (no web mgmt consoled on public ips!)

What you’ve got here is asking for trouble and will be a management mess.

Create somthing like 4 tiers of network and seprate these with your firewall, or two firewalls.

1. DMZ (private IPs and nginx go here and pass through to #2 only required ports)
2. main docker and VMS (only allow access between DMZ and data layers, no outgoing/egress.
3. Your data - the core, only allow layer #2 devices that need access.
4. VMWare mangment (it called out of band netwoking) - this is where you have use a private way of accessing this network for back end manamgent. This network cant accress 1,2 or 3)

RCLONE is your friend!

Datacentre + 25 years of Linux expertise here:

Design the system around how you use your data, how important your data is, and where you want to back it up etc. Forget about chossing te platfor first…but…

Open source gives you WAY more options, Windows will just share files.

Eg Open souce NAS will ley you sync and aggregate all your cloud storage and backup apps as one single virtual cached storage directory all avaiable in your file explorer. No stupid clients and bloat. Open source will give you snapshots too. All sync happen in the backgroud with real intergrity checking. (For example, look at RCLONE as a wonderful onedrive client replacement for a virtual cloud filesystem, just run this on your NAS. )

Open source also lets you add unlimited Backblaze backup to you NAS without the business subscription (if you’ve got a few basic Linux skills.)

Open source also allows a wide array of virutual machines or containers for other handy home network utilities (think always-on pi hole, DNS add blockers etc)

Even though I have a lifetime LastPass subscripion I still choose to pay the $10 bucks and stay with Bitwarden not just becuse I wanted the yubikey support, its also just so simple to use and I love its simplicity. Its also polite and does not bring any extra bloatware. Its really quite good value. It just does its job really nicely

heres one thats worthwhile if you have thunderbolt:

I’ve bought 3 nucs to get 40GBPS networking and HA between them and then run Vmware VSAN express. From there you can go nuts with the possibilites.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/thunderbolt-4-based-ring-network-between-intel-nucs-for-ceph-storage-on-proxmox/195285

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IfArhUdAm8

what is your platform?

You will be fine with just a few simple things to make sure of:

• The hardware will probably be just fine.
• Just dont hang your data out on the internet . If you just need remote access to manage the NAS then a jump sever like Gucamole in a DMZ or container somhow will be great. If you want remote access to your actual data over SMB and such then options like Tailscale may be useful to you.
• Look into other backup methods like Backblaze or similar if the data has any value. You could even setup rync to another location.