my home server needs to be reconstructed and i’m seeking ideas on how to future proof it. here’s some ascii art in a screenshot to help describe how it’s currently setup:

description (left to right):

• laptops, smartphones, tables, etc connect to an access point configured on a windows 10 virtual machine (vm). the windows10 vm uses pci passthrough on the wireless adapter and this is done to get gigabit wifi speeds since intel’s drivers won’t allow linux to do this in ap mode; but will allow it just fine if you’re using windows.
• requests from the wifi clients are passed via dns & ip masquerade to another virtual machine based on pfsense
• pfsense serves as the router, firewall, vpn, ad blocking & web hosting and it’s also configured to use pci passthrough on the primary network interface to gap internet traffic from the server
• the center of the drawing shows how i perform data backups using a 3 gig wired connection with a hardware switch and i setup the host ubuntu server to manage dhcp on the secondary network interface & the devices that are connect to the switch. the data is stored using rsync and harddrives are setup to use an extremely large lvm made of several different types of hard drives.

i’ve rebuilt this server multiple times each time i encountered a “gotcha” or a surprise that i had not anticipated and it made some needful component stop working; so i’m seeking advice from Lemmy on how to redesign this to mitigate future surprises.

some of the surprises i’ve encountered so far are:

• the pfsense logs overfilled the root volume of the bsd based vm because logrotate was configured for linux. the image is hardcoded with a single volume so i will need to find a way to borrow some space from the backup volume using nfs and configure the logs to write there instead of locally.
• i have no key for the windows10 vm; so i’m forced to clone it’s qcow image and manually configure the hotspot each time the 30 day free trial from microsoft expires. I intend to improve upon this creating an ansible job to rotate this virtual machine every 30 days automatically and include powershell based tasks to configure the hotspot in windows automatically
• intel limits the speed for linux native internet connection sharing to 100 megabits (already mentioned & fixed above)
• the local users home volume overfills when trying to take my google backups (already fixed)
• my cats & dogs LOVE the taste of cat6 capables and cat6 is required for 3 gigabit speeds (also fixed)

constraints:

• don’t spend anymore $$$
• gigabit wifi speed is A MUST
• 3 gigabit backups speeds are a must too