Heavily leaning this way, thank you for another vote!

Their modem is my router; it’s both. That’s why I need a new one, to do exactly as you’re describing (is my understanding, although another post here suggests otherwise).

That is true that the most important part is just to keep the outside… out. I’d love to learn more intricate/advanced network setups and security too. I do work in IT, and knowing this stuff certainly wouldn’t be bad on my resume, and I’ve actually always been interested in learning it regardless. But perhaps you make a good point that I can secure it from the outside and get things functional, and then work on further optimization down the line. Makes things a little less daunting, haha.

I sometimes travel for work, as an example, and need to be able to access things to take care of things while I’m away and the girlfriend is home, or when she’s with me and someone else is watching the place (I have a dog that needs petsat). I definitely have the time to tinker with it. Patience may be another thing, though, lol.

The more replies like this I get, the more I’m inclined to set up a second computer with just TrueNAS and let it do nothing but handle that. I assume that, then, would be usable by the server running proxmox with all its containers and whatnots.

Thank you for the input!

Huh, this is interesting, I’ll have to take another look into this. Thanks for the lead!
And I do have a UPS, and it is, indeed, pretty glorious that my internet, security cameras, and server all stay online for a good bit of time after an outage, and don’t even flinch when the power is only out briefly. Convenience and peace of mind. Well worth a UPS.

I like the advice to use a VM for anything specifically touching hardware. I think I’ll run with that. Thank you! External access is tricky, I know, and doing it securely and safely is really paramount for me. This is the one thing that’s keeping me from just “jumping in” with things. I don’t want to mess that part up.

I am running HA in a container, so that’s not an option, unfortunately. If I’m being honest, though, it’s probably not a bad idea to start fresh with HA and re-import individual automations one-by-one, because HA has a lot of “slop” leftover from when I was first learning it and playing around with it.

You make a very good argument for Tailscale, and I think I’ll definitely be looking deeper into that.

I like your suggestion to map out functional requirements, and then go from there. I think I’ll go ahead and start working on a decent map for that.

As far as the new router for pi-hole… my super-great, wonderful, most awesome ISP (I hope the sarcasm is evident, haha; the provider is AT&T) dictates that I use their specific modem/router (not optional), and they also do not allow me to change DHCP on that mandated hardware. So my best option, so far as I’ve seen, is to use the ISP’s box in pass-through with a better router behind it that I can actually set up to use pi-hole.

Thank you for your thoughts and suggestions! I’m going to take a deeper look at Tailscale and get started properly mapping high-level needs/wants out, with options for each.

I’ll take a look at that one as well, thank you!

I forgot to mention, I do use docker-compose for (almost) all the stuff I’m currently using and, yes, it’s pretty great for keeping things, well… containerized, haha. Clean, organized, and easy to tinker with something and completely ditch it if it doesn’t work out.

Thanks for the input!

I might be able to scrounge together another physical server to use strictly as a NAS, that isn’t a bad idea. Thank you for the suggestion!

Recommend you do, it’s a pretty great game. And if mods are your jam, there’s a ton of them that add a lot of content to the game.