5 port unmanaged switch for $9.99

https://www.amazon.com/Tenda-Gigabit-Ethernet-Desktop-SG105/dp/B01K1JUE1E/ref=mp_s_a_1_15?

I only lost $100 last weekend. I realized recently that the NVMe that I thought was in my server was actually a 2.5” SSD. Not sure how I forgot about that…. Then I upped my Ram from 16 to 32 (maxed out) to allow room for additional VMs.

Your server build lacks storage or power supply.

Your general use lacks storage. I would also recommend adjusting to i5/16GB for general use. If you end up gaming then you could have an excuse to bump it to 32GB along with of course a video card.

Use Proxmox as your hypervisor then you can run as many and how many different types operating system you want on top of it all at the same time.

UDM-PRO, USW-Aggregation, USW-Enterprise-24-POE, U6-LR… build a server with i5/32GB NVMe boot drive, then some RAID drives… I took out a loan in this scenario as $1,000 wouldn’t cover my entire rack getting blown up.

What a blast from the past! I still have my 74GB floating around somewhere.

There is a ton to digest and so many unknowns. I would assume the network every device is connected to is compromised. Get every device offline including the light bulbs. I would then create a new “clean” network where reformatted devices can be placed back onto one at a time. I would also strongly recommend keeping IoT devices on their own separate network.

8 GB of RAM doesn’t cut it these days. You’re looking at wanting 16 GB as a minimum for a general use computer or 32 GB for a gaming computer. I suggest looking up your model of laptop online to see if you’re able to upgrade your RAM. Some computers’ RAM is soldered and nonupgradable.

I doubt you would notice much a performance hit if any. What you’re losing out on is reliability. You playing games and downloading/executing stuff causes extra processes to run that normally wouldn’t on a server. The more processes running the more chances for a glitch in the matrix to crash the machine. You could also do an update that breaks compatibility with other programs (not so much an issue with Docker). The biggest point of a dedicated sever at home is the fact that you set it then don’t fuck with it - This leads to higher reliability.

My mom fell for this scam along with paying them $500.00…. Doing a complete reformat of the computer is the only correct answer.

We have cameras covering the driveway, front yard, backyard, garage, family room downstairs and living room upstairs. The two inside cameras are angled to capture as much of the upper and lower living spaces as possible.

• driveway so we can see people coming and going such as food or friends… if we had any.
• front yard to cover anyone that may park in front of our house instead of driveway otherwise we wouldn’t know about them
• backyard to keep an eye on the kid playing and knowing when the neighbor kids jump the fence to grab their balls
• garage so my wife can yell at me when I’m doing something unsafe or a visual confirmation we closed the garage door (got an app for that but physically seeing it is more reassuring)
• living room/family room to keep tabs on the kid when we are elsewhere in the house as well as to get a quick glance when we aren’t home and get worst-case scenario thoughts in our head

Basically, I’d only question his motives if he wants to install a camera in the bedroom or bathroom.

I have multiple layers of ad blocking.

• Pihole for DNS
• Firefox w/uBlock Origin & SponsorBlock (YouTube) on every PC
• Brave browser on iPhones.
• SmartTubeNext (YouTube) on Chromecast
• All of my mobile devices are connected by VPN to utilize Pihole when I’m not home

I have a 2 bay NAS in RAID1 that houses all of our documents, family photos, etc. This is pushed to the cloud with up-to 30 day versioning of individual files.

RAID is for data redundancy. Cloud is for backup.

I would recommend bringing it to an independent shop with good reviews to ask them to perform a bumper to bumper inspection. Probably cost about an hour of labor but you’ll get a better idea of what is actually needing to be replaced.

I used to use Ubuntu VMs on Proxmox host but I’ve switched to Debian a year or so ago.

Lookup pihole and unbound. You’ll get ad blocking along with your own dns resolver. There are several near-copy-paste tutorials out there.

You definitely don’t want to expose your internal services to the Internet. If you must, such as a website, use a reverse proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager). Everything else should be accessed from your VPN.

What registrar do you use? Look up “ddclient” and find a tutorial for configuring it to your registrar. When properly configured, it will push your current IP every X minutes so that example.com will translate to you even if your IP changes.

My services all serve a purpose.

I host a portfolio website. It gets me exposure even though I’m not actively seeking other employment.

My wife runs her own travel agency so her website is also required.

Pihole is used daily to block ads on our network.

Wireguard is on our mobile devices (phones, laptops) so we always have a secure connection on untrusted wifi, ad blocking, access to our documents that live on our file server. I’m at MCO right now waiting for a flight with full confidence that my connection is secure.

Nginx proxy manager to route the website traffic.

Rclone is used to regularly backup the file server that holds our documents.

Minecraft server because happy toddler = happy life.

I used to selfhost bitwarden (vaultwarden) but changed to paying $10/yr to relieve myself of the added stress that it brought for security/backups.