I have a rule that “Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden.”

Well, actually it’s my wife’s rule but it’s a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there’s a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the “last mile” for anything climate control or security related.

There have been a few times when it’s been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn’t working and I don’t want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to “Manual”.

I use Jellyfin with FinAmp for Android. Even supports offline caching.

Jellyfin, Immich, and Paperless-ngx are three of the apps I use the most but you do whatever works best for you. That’s half the advantage of self hosting. You can have a solution that’s custom tailored to your needs.

After a quick glance at the demo, I think the UI design is better than Paperless-ngx (at least on mobile). But, it only has tags. Not correspondents and document types. It also lacks the automatic matching feature, advanced search filters, custom fields, and customizable document views that Paperless has.

Does the new ISP require use of their router or just offer it as an option?

AT&T used to require using their router, which was a pile of hot garbage. I have a Mikrotik Router and managed to mostly cut the AT&T router out but I had to configure my router to use the AT&T router for authentication, at which point the Mikrotik would take over. It was complicated to configure but it worked.

That’s a tough one. There’s not a ton of great options for personal accounting apps, much less self hosted ones. I used Pocket Smith (subscription based) for years which actually does what your looking for. Decent product overall. I switched from them to Quicken mostly because I’m an anal retentive personal accounting nerd and the fact that they couldn’t produce a conventional income statement or balance sheet was a long running frustration of mine.

If I had to choose another platform again, I would go with spreadsheets since it can be as simple or complex as you want to make it. I know that’s not really what youre looking for. Wish I had a better suggestion.

Since you’re already working in C#, an ASP.Net Core backed, with whatever database you prefer, will do what you want.

You could self host it, but I wouldn’t call that easy. There are plenty of cloud providers that can integrate with your preferred git repo and really streamline the build and deployment process. I run a few applications as “Apps” on Digital Ocean. Once you get it configured properly, deployments are quick and easy.

Some of the features you’re looking for led me to switch to Quicken a few years ago. It’s a legacy desktop app (Quicken Online sucks) and it’s not very fast but it is still the gold standard for personal accounting software. I’ve honestly been happier with it than I was with anything else I’ve tried.

Thankfully Intuit sold it off so they can’t enshitify it anymore.

About 12 years ago, I promised an agent at Safeco (AKA Liberty Mutual) that they would never get another penny from me because they wouldn’t honor the terms of my policy, refusing to pay the full amount on a vehicle collision claim. They’re just another business that doesn’t keep their word. But I absolutely plan to keep mine.

I would advise against it. Separation of concerns isn’t important until it is. If your host server is unavailable for any reason, now EVERYTHING is unavailable. Having your server go down is bad. Being unable to browse the internet when your host is down and you’re trying to figure out why is worse.

There are also risks involved in running your firewall on the same host as all your other VM’s without adding a lot of complex network configurations.

At some point I need to migrate off Hyper-V. Probably to Proxmox.

Ugh. I don’t wanna.

Ok, now this is just showing off. Patch cables all the exact required length and everything all nice and neat. I bet you check your backups regularly and do a monthly DR fail over test too.

…Kidding aside, your setup looks really good.

Horsepower is a very rough “average” of work output over a given period of time. It doesn’t really account for spikes in load. For that we’ll have have to consider the torque. So the real question is, how many foot/pounds or newton/meters does OP need to handle 10 gigs of throughput?

The benefit of splitting services between VM’s is the same as it always has been: I can break one service without breaking ALL of them. Containers are an improvement over native installs but they do not solve this problem completely.

Not nearly good enough to make me give up Quicken but it is nice to see some more self hosted options popping up.

I use a combination of both. SSD’s to store read/write intensive data. In my case, I run multiple VM’s and store the primary VHD’s on SSD’s. HDD’s for stuff where space matters more than speed, like digital media and local backups.

Every time I think about hosting my own mail server, I think back to the many, many, many times I’ve had to troubleshoot corporate email systems over the years. From small ones that ran on duct tape and prayers to big ones that were robust, high dollar systems.

98% of the time, the reason the messages aren’t coming or going is something either really obscure or really stupid. Email itself isn’t that complicated and it’s a legacy communications medium at this point. But it’s had so much stuff piled on top of it for spam and fraud prevention, out of necessity, and that’s where the major headaches come from. Honestly, it’s one service that to me it’s worth paying someone else to deal with.

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If you’re not hosting any publicly available services, then no. A reverse proxy would be unnecessary. You can just just set static records in your DNS server that tell it which internal hostname goes with what IP and it will relay that info to any device on your local network that requests it. Even with a Wireguard connection, you can tell it to use the DNS server from your local network.

They do maintain an x86 build. I haven’t used pfSense but I have used OpnSense so that’s that closest thing I have to compare it to. I think the upside and downside to RouterOS/Mikrotik is the same thing: it allows very granular control over almost everything. Maybe to a fault. It’s probably overkill for most home networks.