Yes, it’s possible
You need a SIP trunk to connect to and a PBX server. I would also recommend a proxy server to obfuscate your SIP server as it will be constantly attacked.
It doesn’t technically need its own network, but having it on its own VLAN is recommended as you will want to have some QoS policies for the UDP voice traffic otherwise your call audio will be choppy
This would turn the Internet into a hell scape if only because corporations could throw huge amounts of money around.
There would be incentive for the Pizza Huts and the Walmarts of the world to just assume control of the websites for any local competitors.
Domain squatting is incredibly scummy, but I have no idea how it would be possible to have any other system.
My understanding is that domains do expire unless you pay the fee to renew for another year.
Regarding unused domain names, how would anyone know if a particular name is being unused? Domain names are used for more things than browsable websites. You’d have to have a system that could determine if traffic is going to those names, which seems bad from a privacy standpoint and also pretty easy to script around.
I agree that for this size of network AD is definitely not something you want to deal with unless you want to learn how it works.
However, I’m not sure it really increases attack vectors to have it running, outside of the fact that it’s a new network service on the LAN. The out of the box default configuration is not bad these days, security-wise
It’s a lot cheaper than getting an EE to design you a more efficient bespoke solution.
Yep, exactly.
If you can buy 10 Pis for the cost of one real PLC, and the only downtime you have if it fails is the time to swap the board and boot the machine back up it’s a no-brainer solution.
I mean, the cold reality is that they developed and released a perfect piece of hardware for industrial automation and sold it for pennies in comparison to other industrial computer boards.
Industry will always have deeper pockets than hobbyists.
I can’t say anything about US cities, but they are all over the place in Canadian cities(or at least they are where I live)
It really depends on how much you value your time and how good you are with configuration
A QNAP or Synology will work and be pretty simple to configure out of the box. Installing custom software is possible, but can be tricky as they require you to enable sideloading and custom apps can be hard to find. Both have supported app stores with available apps to do what you’re looking for (QNAP has apps for both torrents and Plex. Not sure about Synology)
However, you will get way more bang for your buck by building one from scratch using something like TrueNAS and the Arr stack, but this can require a fair bit of technical knowledge about configuring containers and securing network services(Especially if you want them to be accessible remotely)
Most people here do selfhosting as a hobby and as a result, the time spent trying new configurations is negligible as it wouldn’t be much of a hobby otherwise.