GreyBeard

M365 is doing away with all legacy authentication, do not be surprised if IMAP is completely unusable in the next 12 months. If you simply want to keep a copy of everything, a store and forward SMTP proxy would probably be the solution, so all email going to your domain would hit that first, then send off to M365.

The advantage of docker, as I see it for home labs, is keeping things tidy, ensuring compatibility, and easy to manage/backup setup configs, app configs, and app data. It is all very predictable and manageable. I can move my docker compose and data from one host to another in literal seconds. I can, likewise, spin up and down test environments in seconds too. Obviously the whole scaling thing that people love containers for is pointless in a homelab, but many of the things that make it scalable also make it easy to manage.

Nope. It can be cloud if you want it to, but generally, you can host your own controller. I run the controller in a docker container, personally.

I’d suggest looking into the Unifi product line. They have products that meet your needs and then some. I believe the company is based out of the EU so you are likely good in imports.

The problem with WordPress and the like is maintenance. If you don’t keep it up to date, it will get taken by malware. Guaranteed. Any plugins you add increase the risk.

I moved my blog to a markdown based compiled site a long time ago so I didn’t have to worry about that upkeep.

So I setup every “client” to have the “server” as the introducer and auto-accept shares. Then on the “server”, I add the new client, and give it all the shares. The new device auto accepts, and all the other clients automatically include the new client.

I may be misunderstanding what you want, but the introducer feature seems to solve the problem. You setup your “server” as the introducer for all your other devices, then when you add a device, you just setup your new device with the server, and all other devices get the trust of the new device from the server.

Completely unrelated: A feature that server likely has that you should investigate is called “iDRAC”. There is probably a dedicated NIC on the back for it. It allows you to power on the server, control most “BIOS” features, and see the screen remotely.

Often you can mirror ports on routers and switches, this lets you send the same packets to a device as gets sent to your router. This will allow you to use something like wireguard to capture the packets and inspect them. Unfortunately for you, the vast majority of traffic is encrypted these days. So most of the time you can see how much data is being transmitted to Google, but not what data. Tools like Fiddler will help you on a specific machine, where it can decrypt it on the fly.

They certainly have their limitations. I think the same limits are one the gateway I have(I run my own controller, so a dream machine is overkill). Can’t say I’ve encountered a situation where I need WAN VLANs on a home system, though.

The guest wifi may use VLANs on the backend, but it is in no way surfaced to the person managing it. I run Unifi equipment at home, which gives me the power to do all of that however I want, but it doesn’t sound like the OP is there yet.

VLANs are a way of separating your network into logical networks without physically separating them. They are useful, but generally require your networking equipment to support them. Most cheap home switches don’t really support VLANs, nor do most consumer routers.

For work we have standards, ideally we separate VLANs by device type and firewall off their communication, but on a home network, I’d generally group by category. .1-9 network gear like switches and firewalls. .10-19 IOT. .20-29 servers & NAS. So on and so forth.

There’s a difference between self hosting and running a public service. There’s a lot more overhead running a pubic service.

The first screenshot is of Dells built in system tools for servers. Being a Dell server he should have Dell’s iDRAC, which is a lights out management module. It is really fantastic.