What are you doing in your "homelab" that needs a $2000 CPU? If you don't need the PCIe lanes or memory bandwidth, get a Ryzen for 1/8th the cost and a third of the platform power requirement. You'll get better single core IPC anyway, which is still king.

That's really the upside of the "NAS" drives, they usually come with a solid "no questions asked" warranty. That's really all you're paying for in some cases, especially for mechanical drives.

This is completely normal for a machine exposed to the internet. In the words of Obi Wan, "Nothing to see here, move along ..."

I've got a dual-wan UXG-Pro and am lucky enough to have two 1Gbps providers (fiber + cable), plus an employer who reimburses me for both. I have a small wired T-Mobile LTE MiFi device as backup, but never needed it. ($20 a month + usage over 2GB)

Ahhh, Datadog, the sleazy used car salesmen of the observability market. Seriously, they're hucksters.

Only reason I keep a Windows box around!

My TLDs are:
.lan = management/wired vlan
.mobile = primary wifi
.iot = locked down for iot/home automation devices .guest = guest wifi

The domain for each is my public .io domain.

Because people get overly emotional about stupid things. Once you get a bit older and more mature, most people grow out of that. But for the ones who never do, they think their "way" is the "right way" and if you don't do it the "right way" ... "you're wrong."

At the end of the day, if what you're using meets your needs, then it's the right choice. Period. End of story.

Lower your MTU to 1380 and try again.

This switch runs hot to the touch, even with the default screamer fans. If you swap for Noctuas it's going to die a rapid death.

The ARM series Macbooks don't support external GPUs.

Quick FYI for folks looking for a learning opportunity - if anyone is looking at this as a professional learning experience, this would be far, far too confusing and has entirely too much info. If this were a complex banking system, for example, this would be broken down into 3 or 4 different diagrams, with a dedicated diagram for each of the key systems as well, and info like IP wouldn't be included. (Just had to re-do a bunch of diagrams for one of the largest banks in the world, because they had grown to be incredibly complex like this.)

For a homelab though, I love it. I especially like the very unusual color scheme because all the colors complement each other very well. OP, you have a good eye for color.