Klox

It can absolutely be overwhelming, and very easy to forget specifics over a long time. It’s partly why I don’t really go for CLI apps, and ~all of my apps are just Ansible manifests. Which apps are causing the biggest problems for your family?

What exactly is breaking each of these times? Guides that cover 95% sound pretty solid to me. It’s hard to write a guide covering 100% of scenarios. Admittedly I also worked in the field, but the field is extremely wide so maybe there’s some knowledge areas to deepen that are commonly giving you problems and/or move towards a less brittle setup.

Re-evaluating what’s important is important. If it’s not fun then you should reflect on having the right balance of what is helping you and your family vs causing excessive stress. IMO the “avoid all tech companies” is slightly overblown (blasphemous, I know). It’s a good guiding principle but it’s fine to “buy services” that make your life better. For example, I self host a lot, but I was totally fine buying a finances tracking app (the spreadsheet-based one) because it’s doing a lot of heavy lifting that I can’t reasonably do myself at the level of convenience I want.

Was he put into the casket alive with a poison triggered by a random event? If so, love that conviction.

For a Homelab, I cannot imagine going with anything other than older used SFF boxes for my router. I’ve been running PfSense and then OPNSense on them for over a decade.

[Mini PC] Very DIY, would feel afraid of misconfiguring the device and exposing myself to security issues

The risk is there for every router software, and the form factor won’t change that. The OPNSense software is pretty solid and the tutorials are less likely to lead you astray. You will learn a lot with a deep dive on OPNSense. So I’d say just go for the used hardware. The nice thing is your entire OPNSense config is a single file making it easy to back up and restore. If the hardware it craps out on you in 5 years, you take your OPNSense config (regularly back it up with one of the plugins) and a new mini PC and you are running again.

A general PC will crush most routing tasks. The only concern is encryption but anything newish should be fine. Multi gig connections and 10G inner network has been great on my Optiplex.

2. Does anybody have any suggestions for PoE capable switches and access points that play nicely with OPNSense - I’ve been considering MicroTik but I’m not entirely sure what to look for.

They should all be fine. OPNSense is your router and firewall, and IMO it doesn’t really influence my downstream hardware choices (switches, APs, etc.).

Not sure how the used market is in UK. Last year I decided to go 10G so bought a used Brocade ICX 7250 48x PoE+ RJ45 8x 1/10 GbE SFP+ Gigabit Switch for $78 on ebay. Its been so nice! 48x PoE ports and 6x 10G ports. It takes a detailed walkthrough and some head scratching to get it running well so I wouldn’t really recommend it specifically without a bit of experience. But it is easily the best bang for your buck. Throw in 10G SFP+ PCIE module into all your important machines and use passthrough DACs and you’ve got a flexible 10G setup for $200-$300.

I am not familiar with FritzBox so not sure how that changes the calculus.