Reolink offers PoE cameras and NVRs recorders. It is what I have. You can plug in a monitor/keyboard into their NVR and set everything up from there without any networking.

Regarding hardening, if you have a firewall you can create rules that block connections between your NVR and the open internet.

https://support.reolink.com/articles/900000617826-Which-Reolink-Products-Support-CGI-RTSP-ONVIF/

Laptop: cheaper and easier, but keeping the battery charged constantly will degrade it (no matter how many battery protection features it has), and upgradability is somewhat limited.

Mini PC + UPS: more upfront cost, some elbow grease required to integrate power monitoring (but it's not difficult), but more flexibility to expand, and the UPS can provide power to other devices like an access point. Also, the UPS battery uses a different chemistry and is made for that specific purpose, meaning it'll take longer to degrade.

You need to keep in mind that most laptops are not going to have 2 ethernet ports(or even 1 these days). You will need 1 port to connect to your modem and 1 port to provide the network to an AP. All ports aren't created equal. If you want good speeds you want to find something with 2 good ethernet ports. Your internet speed will determine what is good enough for you port wise. If you are fine with pretty slow speeds then a laptop can work and you can use a usb to ethernet adapter but that's a bit janky. If you intend to use the built in wifi card for the AP just know it won't be nearly as good as a dedicated AP. Check out the Lenovo ThinkCentre line. It has some good options with decent ports. As for a UPS you can sometimes find something better by looking at "Solar Power Generators" instead. They're basically just batteries with an inverter and outlets on them. And they can recharge from solar which is why they have the name. But a lot of times they're the better bang for your buck than a normal UPS. And if you got a few solar panels you could hook them up to it. Which it sounds like might be useful to you in general.

You absolutely need a UPS, even if you have a laptop, power going in and out and being out of voltage is not great even for a laptop

Laptop all the way.

The mini PC and UPS are separate systems with no integration. Trying to get them talking so that your mini PC can respond to lower going down by saving things and shutting down cleanly is a lot more work than doing the same with a laptop.

Also a laptop you already own costs you nothing to get started with. If you add some external storage to it and then one day add a server you can simply move that external storage over to a new server. So if you do end up doing self hosting or a home lab you will well on the way.

If you already have an old laptop, and the battery will hold a charge for even 20 minutes, then it might be worthwhile to just give it a whirl. If you have it tucked away with the lid closed, it's possible that it'll run slightly warmer than it normally would, when running 24/7. And if you do find that expandability is too constricted, then upgrading to newer hardware and moving the HDD/SSD over should be easy enough.

IME, mortality bias means that if an old laptop is still functional a decade after its manufacture, then it's likely to keep ticking when in service as a 24/7 machine. The things that permanently break hardware are thermal stress, capacitors charging up and down, and other factors which are alleviated when a machine is just left powered.

I haven't tried navidrome etc. with software switching, but I would assume they work fine, as they also work over the internet. It's more of a problem for protocols designed to run in the same L2 network.

I never did that extensive testing, because I either had a printer in the network or needed more ports, where getting a switch was cheaper.

Shouldn't this be a non issue for the gateway. For more context on my setup, I have a jellyfin & navidrome server which are all lan. I have a wireguard exit node, a WiFi ap, Plex server, & normal residential traffic which would be querying wan quite often. Would you still expect to see the drawbacks of software switching? If so, what would you reccomend for the router?

You can sometimes get away with software switching, like when almost all of your traffic goes to WAN anyways.

Software switching doesn't scale well with smaller packet sizes and sometimes has problems maintaining line rate speeds. In my experience network shares like SMB and broadcast traffic like mDNS (like for printers) are the first to cause problems.

Most of the time risking it / not knowing if a problem is caused by software switching is not worth the money saved.

Using a dedicated switch with lots of LAN to LAN traffic also means the CPU of the router isn't busy software switching and can focus on routing / firewalling WAN traffic reaching higher speeds and less latency.

But please don't use OPNsense as a switch.

Could you elaborate, why is it bad as a switch?

Ive been running OPNsense on office PCs for quite some time now and have been very happy with it. There's quite a few changes at the moment while they're modernizing the code base, but the migration assistants worked well, the wiki was up to date in my experience tho. The wiki is improving at least :3

But please don't use OPNsense as a switch.

I use opnsense but self host hardware. I love it and think it's a great fw. I agree documentation can be thin, but usually the pfsense documents will get you 80% of the way to your goal

Even if it isn't written by AI, it's certainly written by someone with very little experience on the subject.

Which is worse, because its polluting up the search results. Infuriating.

I've also been taking 5v on esp32 and esp8266 pins for years without any issues whatsoever.

The article also claims DS18B20 are happy with 3.3v - technically yes, but if you have any long runs they are much more reliable at 5v. Yes every time I refer to a LLM when wiring them, it constantly makes the same point this article does, which is that dividers must be used. I think that lends weight to your claim that it's AI written.

Even if it isn't written by AI, it's certainly written by someone with very little experience on the subject.

Unreadable AI slop.

Did the author actually test 5v into the microcontroller? The signal values might be intended to be 3.3v, but I have a bunch of esp32 boards reading 5v signals on their pins, and they have been doing that for years now. At the time I did some research and found posts from the espressif designer that claimed that the pins were okay with 5v.

That's the hard case. When you can't predict what a client will ask for, backing up the whole project folder is simpler than trying to pick files, and moving finished projects to an archive keeps the active set small.

Yeah, it does feel like that. I wanted to backup my photos but eventually realized that instead of just uploading them to a NAS, I could use something like Immich to get a nice gallery. Immich even calls uploading from your phone backup. So my photos are backed up now, right? Nope, you have to back up Immich too. Ah, ok, it has these database backups, that’s fine right? Nope, that’s just a db dump, you need to backup the actual photo files. Ok, I will setup RAID so they are mirrored to another hard drive. RAID IS NOT BACKUP!!! Ok, fine, I will rsync them to another external hard drive periodically. Nope, what if your place burns down? Ok, I will also spend 13€ a month on a Hetzner storage box and upload an encrypted backup there with borg. Where are you storing your borg passphrase? Fine, I’ll write it down on a piece of paper and give that to my parents to store at their house. Am I done? Is that 3-2-1? Yeah, but it’s not automated, you should have a backup server. Aaaahhhhhh!

Problem I have is so much of my data is "projects" where like, only god and my client know what random shit they'll ask for.

Totally get that. You don't have to back up everything, just the stuff you can't replace: photos, documents, configs. That set is usually small enough for an old USB drive plus a cheap or free offsite option. Rebuildable stuff (media, ISOs, containers you can redeploy) can skip it. Imperfect backups of the important 5% beat a perfect plan you never get to.

Ha, it absolutely feels like one, right up until a bad sync or a fat-fingered rm hits every disk at once. With 2x8 TB plus a 14 TB, one layout people often land on is mirroring the two 8s (ZFS mirror) for live data and using the 14 TB as a separate backup target (snapshots replicated to it), plus something offsite for the stuff you can't lose. That gets you redundancy and an actual backup out of the same three drives.

I’m what?

Just use old HDD and thumb drive that are too small, for backup.

you're*

I agree. This is also nice because if you need more space in the future you can always add 8TB drives in pairs.

I have had some less than stellar results asking AI to create configurations files. I usually have to sit down and figure everything out anyways because the AI would give me a generic configuration file that wouldn't work with my system.