I get quite a few reccomend actions from the sci-fi/fantasy rss feeds I’m subscribed to. I also get some from suggestions on lemmy.

A custom router + managed switch is a great way to learn. Studying the fundamentals is also good, but in my opinion it’s not as fun as setting up your own network and learning hands-on.

If you decide to go this route I highly reccomend taking regular backups of your config (and backup again before you change stuff). Part of learning involves breaking things - trust me you will break your network - and in networking that’s one of the best ways to learn. Backups will give you an easy way to restore to a known working configuration.

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Yes. A unifi ap connects all my wireless devices to my LAN

Yes its my main router. Everything comes into the laptop across one interface setup as a trunk that includes vlans for WAN, LAN, etc. From there proxmox has a vlan aware linux bridge setup that connects to all the VMs/containers that I run. The VM virtual interfaces get tagged with whatever network I want the host to be part of.

I have a laptop motherboard setup with proxmox running:

• plex
• radarr,sonarr,prowlarr
• opnsense
• foundry VTT
• pi-hole
• unifi controller
• qbittorrent
• kavita

This is running on an i5-1135 with 40gigs of memory. If your frugal about how you have stuff setup you can pack alot of services into old laptops.