You basically need a router between the networks. I would recommend pfsense or opnsense or if you like cli vyOS. I run a pfsense that has my ISP router on the WAN port and a network interface for all VLANs and then I configured the firewall to allow specific traffic to specific devices in specific VLANs. For example my PC can reach the smart home controller website but no other device. And the samrthome devices only can reach the DNS in the ISP network (my kinda DMZ) and the router to reach the internet. And for every VLAN there are own rules where goes what communication.

You also can setup that on the managed switch which you would need for setting up VLANs.

2 days for most hosts as they had a kernel update. Other hosts about 30 days (no updates pending). And the winner is my core switch with 750 days up time.

Yea don’t use enterprise stuff and build servers yourself with lowpower hardware. Less power less heat also can be cooled easier with Noctua Low RPM low noise fans.

Moving your gaming PC as client makes no sense no. But gaming servers like a Minecraft or whatever severer can make sense.

I can recommend XCP-NG as Hypervisor. I have over 25 VMs running my whole home from DHCP/DNS over media servers to game servers for CS2 and DayZ. And it’s stable and performant.

Don’t use NTFS either Linux as 24/7 file system. Use Linux natives like ext4, xfs or zfs. And share the drive via samba. If it’s a drive that needs to travel between systems use EXFat.

Free electricity for everyone.

Use ELK. It’s basically the same but open source and unlimited for free. Also splunk sucks. Have to use it at work and it really isn’t great. (My personal opinion)

That‘s normal. There are countless bot nets that scan every public available IP to hijack. Using fail2ban is already a good approach. I personally switched to crowdsec a while ago as it comes with a crowdsourced blacklist which will silence a lot of the common noise and only occasionally I get an Alarm about an IP address not already on the default list.

I got one HGST with now almost 11 years. And some WD Reds with 9 to 10 years. They run now in a Helios 64 which I use to store DVD and BluRay backups before they get tagged correctly and moved to my Plex storage pool.

Windows bad. Linux good. BSD better.

For real though. Windows cost money, it uses a lot of resources. And Desktop Version is missing vital parts you might want to use on a windows server like Domain Controller, DHCP, Server, Web Server, Hyper-V. Etc.

Those reasons also have most running Limix or even BSD because they are pretty lightweight especially when used headless. Also as open source they are mostly free of cost. And when you virtualize on a free and open source Hypervisor like XCP-ng or Proxmox you can run way more smaller VMs than Windows VMs as they need more resources.

The Bill at the end of the year.

I am using terraform to create my VMs and destroy them. Using Ansible with the xenorchestra inventory plugin and have it configure the servers I created.

As long as it is not reachable from any untrusted network like the Internet. It’s as safe as your home network is.

Nope. Plain old Almalinux and deploy my services with ansible. I don’t see benefits in the bloatware that any UI on a server is (for me).

And I know I will get hat for this from a part of the community but that’s just my humble opinion.