PSA: saying “I run Nextcloud and don’t have any problems” doesn’t help anyone or contribute anything useful to the conversation. It just makes you look like an insecure fanboy.

The hardware doesn’t matter. Something with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM is enough to run a k8s lab.

Throughput on these “cheap” VPS providers is atrocious. I have 1Gbe into my home and none of the VPS providers can break more than a few hundred mbps, except for Cloudflare. The other issue is consistency, speeds fluctuate all over the map with these cheap VPS providers - even the big one like Vultr, Linode, and Hetzner aren’t much better.

Also, WAF is now free with Cloudflare, so using a solution like this really doesn’t make much sense, unless you’re serving non-http content.

What are you doing in your “homelab” that needs a $2000 CPU? If you don’t need the PCIe lanes or memory bandwidth, get a Ryzen for 1/8th the cost and a third of the platform power requirement. You’ll get better single core IPC anyway, which is still king.

To help you with this, you need to tell us what your environment looks like. A CI/CD pipeline for a VM based infrastructure looks VERY different than a fully GitOpsed k8s platform, which looks different than a pipeline for regular Docker containers, which looks different than if you have some cloud infrastructure, etc etc.

That’s really the upside of the “NAS” drives, they usually come with a solid “no questions asked” warranty. That’s really all you’re paying for in some cases, especially for mechanical drives.

Don’t expose unnecessary things to the internet, keep any client PCs patched, use some sort of malware protection … and that’s all you need to do.

All these VLANs are such are just overkill unless you’re actively exposing things to the internet. They wind up breaking really useful stuff, especially stuff that relies on multicast.

Besides, that Chinese IoT device can’t get hacked if it’s not open to the 'net in the first place.

This is completely normal for a machine exposed to the internet. In the words of Obi Wan, “Nothing to see here, move along …”

I’ve got a dual-wan UXG-Pro and am lucky enough to have two 1Gbps providers (fiber + cable), plus an employer who reimburses me for both. I have a small wired T-Mobile LTE MiFi device as backup, but never needed it. ($20 a month + usage over 2GB)

Ahhh, Datadog, the sleazy used car salesmen of the observability market. Seriously, they’re hucksters.

Only reason I keep a Windows box around!

My TLDs are:
.lan = management/wired vlan
.mobile = primary wifi
.iot = locked down for iot/home automation devices .guest = guest wifi

The domain for each is my public .io domain.

Because people get overly emotional about stupid things. Once you get a bit older and more mature, most people grow out of that. But for the ones who never do, they think their “way” is the “right way” and if you don’t do it the “right way” … “you’re wrong.”

At the end of the day, if what you’re using meets your needs, then it’s the right choice. Period. End of story.

Lower your MTU to 1380 and try again.

This switch runs hot to the touch, even with the default screamer fans. If you swap for Noctuas it’s going to die a rapid death.

The ARM series Macbooks don’t support external GPUs.

Quick FYI for folks looking for a learning opportunity - if anyone is looking at this as a professional learning experience, this would be far, far too confusing and has entirely too much info. If this were a complex banking system, for example, this would be broken down into 3 or 4 different diagrams, with a dedicated diagram for each of the key systems as well, and info like IP wouldn’t be included. (Just had to re-do a bunch of diagrams for one of the largest banks in the world, because they had grown to be incredibly complex like this.)

For a homelab though, I love it. I especially like the very unusual color scheme because all the colors complement each other very well. OP, you have a good eye for color.