For what it's worth, since it sounds like you will be hardware shopping soon: I am using a 2.4GHz Intel Atom C2758 running pfSense and get 2Gb/s down and around 1.5Gb/s up through it. I am using an add-on Intel-based PCIe network adapter, so I'm not sure if that is helping with the CPU load. But it works well.

Saying files are encrypted when it is not true is an issue, regardless of who owns the host box. Even for a small instance that is private family or friends.

The ads also show users interacting with their physical and virtual environments smoothly, without difficulty seeing around them or spatial positioning glitches, which does not at all describe the current state of Meta OS. I've been a Oculus/Meta user for 10 years and the UI is definitely not an Apple experience. (p.s. I hate Apple and love Quest 3)

Wearing a Quest while working on a car sounds like a great way to lose a finger, or destroy the part I'm trying to install/repair. I can feel the frustration bubbling up when I imagine trying to assemble furniture while wearing a headset clamped to my face with a super tight headstrap. Man I'm so pissed now.

As someone who has read these terms in passing but is unfamiliar with them: What the fuck?

But IT is not marketing, which is the subject of this discussion...

Yes, this is totally possible and I did it for a couple of years with OPNsense. I actually had an OPNsense box and a pfSense box both on Hyper-V. I could toggle between them easily and it worked well. There are CPU considerations which depend on your traffic load. Security is not an issue as long as you have the network interface assignments correct and have not accidentally attached the WAN interface to any other guest VM's.

Unfortunately, when I upgraded to 1Gb/s (now 2Gb/s) on the WAN, the VM could not keep up. No amount of tuning in the Hyper-V host (dual Xeon 3GHz) or the VM could resolve the poor throughput. I assume it came down to the 10Gb NICs and their drivers, or the Hyper-V virtual switch subsystem. Depending on what hardware offload and other tuning settings I tried, I would get perfect throughput one way, but terrible performance in the other direction, or some compromise in between on either side. There was a lot of iperf3 testing involved. I don't blame OPNsense/pfSense -- these issues impacted any 10Gb links attached to VM's.

Ultimately, I eliminated the virtual router and ended up where you are, with a baremetal pfSense on a much less powerful device (Intel Atom-based). I'm still not happy with it -- getting a full 2Gb/s up and down is hard.

Aside from performance, one of the other reasons for moving the firewall back to a dedicated unit was that I wanted to isolate it from any issues that might impact the host. The firewall is such a core component of my network, and I didn't like it going offline when I needed to reboot the server.

I do. 4 or 5 users and several computers plus virtual server members. I still use Linux for DNS which works surprisingly well after the initial setup.

I did it half for practice and half for fun, but having the authentication backend makes it good enough to keep around.

Nice. Might come in handy for others considering how common that USR modem design was. I would have liked to see a power-on shot to see how well the PETG lights worked.

Well, this explains why my DNA was found on that murder weapon. Clearly the 23andMe hackers have framed me. Evidence now inadmissible in court.

Just want to clarify - after looking at Porkbun's DNS offerings, it does not appear they do DDNS either. Is that correct? So they are not any better than SquareSpace for that service. Porkbun does have an API interface.

It looks like Namecheap has DDNS support (at least I get valid-looking results when I search for that on their website).

I haven't changed registrars in 10+ years. I am in the same boat re. Google -> SquareSpace. Is DDNS deprecated in favor of API's across the board? It looks more complicated to set up.

My mom used to make them but called them golumpki (which apparently is a Polish word for the same thing)

There will always be a free internet. It just may not be the one currently dominated by corporate datacenters.