Their modem is my router; it's both. That's why I need a new one, to do exactly as you're describing (is my understanding, although another post here suggests otherwise).

That is true that the most important part is just to keep the outside... out. I'd love to learn more intricate/advanced network setups and security too. I do work in IT, and knowing this stuff certainly wouldn't be bad on my resume, and I've actually always been interested in learning it regardless. But perhaps you make a good point that I can secure it from the outside and get things functional, and then work on further optimization down the line. Makes things a little less daunting, haha.

Yeah, I'd definitely considered the fact that I can probably just take the GPU out as soon as proxmox is set up. The only thing I'd leave it for is for transcoding, which may or may not be something I even need to/want to bother with.

Huh, this is interesting, I'll have to take another look into this. Thanks for the lead!
And I do have a UPS, and it is, indeed, pretty glorious that my internet, security cameras, and server all stay online for a good bit of time after an outage, and don't even flinch when the power is only out briefly. Convenience and peace of mind. Well worth a UPS.

I am running HA in a container, so that's not an option, unfortunately. If I'm being honest, though, it's probably not a bad idea to start fresh with HA and re-import individual automations one-by-one, because HA has a lot of "slop" leftover from when I was first learning it and playing around with it.

You make a very good argument for Tailscale, and I think I'll definitely be looking deeper into that.

I like your suggestion to map out functional requirements, and then go from there. I think I'll go ahead and start working on a decent map for that.

As far as the new router for pi-hole... my super-great, wonderful, most awesome ISP (I hope the sarcasm is evident, haha; the provider is AT&T) dictates that I use their specific modem/router (not optional), and they also do not allow me to change DHCP on that mandated hardware. So my best option, so far as I've seen, is to use the ISP's box in pass-through with a better router behind it that I can actually set up to use pi-hole.

Thank you for your thoughts and suggestions! I'm going to take a deeper look at Tailscale and get started properly mapping high-level needs/wants out, with options for each.

I'll take a look at that one as well, thank you!

I'd planned on using the GPU for things like video transcoding (which I know it's probably way overkill for). Perhaps something like stable diffusion to play around with down the line? I'm not entirely sure. I do know that, since the CPU isn't a G series, it'll need to be plugged in at least if/when I need to put a monitor on it. Laziness suggests I'll likely just end up leaving it in there, lol. As far as the dh-15, yeah, that's outrageously overkill, I know, and I may very well slap the stock cooler on it and sell the dh-15.

Thank you!

I forgot to mention, I do use docker-compose for (almost) all the stuff I'm currently using and, yes, it's pretty great for keeping things, well... containerized, haha. Clean, organized, and easy to tinker with something and completely ditch it if it doesn't work out.

Thanks for the input!

I might be able to scrounge together another physical server to use strictly as a NAS, that isn't a bad idea. Thank you for the suggestion!

I'm glad you're having a better time with it! Honestly, if you watch any amount of YouTube on your TV, it's well worth the $20 just for SmartTubeNext. Such a massive improvement to skip all the sponsor, promotion, intro, etc segments.