I’ve been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/

I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it’s been solid ever since.

I would make sure the adapter you’re using (internal or USB) supports AP mode. Most intel ones don’t: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000030429/wireless.html

Is the NIC built into the motherboard or an add on pcie card?

You could check the journal to see if the logs tell you anything.

You could try taking some packet captures from opnsense and your server while accessing your externally available web server. Reviewing the pcaps might give you some hints on how fix it based on what behaviour you see in the captures.

A custom router + managed switch is a great way to learn. Studying the fundamentals is also good, but in my opinion it’s not as fun as setting up your own network and learning hands-on.

If you decide to go this route I highly reccomend taking regular backups of your config (and backup again before you change stuff). Part of learning involves breaking things - trust me you will break your network - and in networking that’s one of the best ways to learn. Backups will give you an easy way to restore to a known working configuration.

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Yes. A unifi ap connects all my wireless devices to my LAN

Yes its my main router. Everything comes into the laptop across one interface setup as a trunk that includes vlans for WAN, LAN, etc. From there proxmox has a vlan aware linux bridge setup that connects to all the VMs/containers that I run. The VM virtual interfaces get tagged with whatever network I want the host to be part of.

I have a laptop motherboard setup with proxmox running:

• plex
• radarr,sonarr,prowlarr
• opnsense
• foundry VTT
• pi-hole
• unifi controller
• qbittorrent
• kavita

This is running on an i5-1135 with 40gigs of memory. If your frugal about how you have stuff setup you can pack alot of services into old laptops.

If your VPS can connect to your home router as a client it sounds like your wireguard server on opnsense is working correctly.

Might be a problem with your phones WG config. Have you tried taking the client .conf file from your VPS and loading it onto your phone to test a working config file?

Just because your using a VPN doesn’t mean you can’t isolate hosts to a separate network. I keep my services in a different VLAN and I can route/firewall traffic between that network and anywhere else as I please.

That’s true. I only use my vpn when I’m out of the house. And the only devices I have with me are my phone/laptop which both have official apps.

In android, for the wireguard/openvpn apps, you can add a button to your swipe down menu (where you toggle on/off wifi, flashlight, etc).

What’s so inconvenient about a VPN?

For future reading this “multiplexing” is called SNI inspection/routing and it can only be used when TLS/SSL is in use.

Yeah that’s what I do as well. I try to avoid tying my services to a company that can change their licensing terms. I’m trying to be self hosted after all!

Have you checked that your physical devices aernt blocking incoming ping requests? Like windows firewall?

You can usually buy replacement fans pretty cheap. I run an old framework laptop motherboard as my server and if the fan ever craps out I can get a new one for 40 bucks.

I agree that other components might not last that long due to heat but if you already have the equipment sitting around and its not a production environment why not use the hardware until it fails?

My plan is whenever I upgrade the motherboard in my laptop I will add the old one to my proxmox cluster. Double upgrade! Faster laptop and more compute for the homelab :)

You can usually buy replacement fans pretty cheap. I run an old framework laptop motherboard as my server and if the fan ever craps out I can get a new one for 40 bucks.

I agree that other components might not last that long due to heat but if you already have the equipment sitting around and its not a production environment why not use the hardware until it fails?

My plan is whenever I upgrade the motherboard in my laptop I will add the old one to my proxmox cluster. Double upgrade! Faster laptop and more compute for the homelab :)

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