Literally what are you talking about??? Why would a company not enforce artificial scarcity, it means they have to produce less and their product is more valuable per item. It costs companies to produce more product, they’re not interested in selling a good product just anything that will keep profit margins high. If anything they’d lay off the actual laborers to keep their executives nice and comfy while “cutting costs” across the board. Why do we subsidize farmers to overproduce and we still have people suffering food insecurity?

I really appreciate all your input, its really helped me connect a few dots that needed connecting so I really do appreciate it my man. I’m aware of the OSI model and I was hoping my work with my homelab would help me understand better, but I’ve still got a ways to go. I really appreciate your explanations on Layer 2 and Layer 3, I understood the definitions but your explanation helps me connect the idea to real world examples. I also understood bridges somewhat but relating it to a switch makes it simple to understand and configure.

Thanks for the links as well, I will be messing around with this config tonight so I will be using your comments as a resource, so really, thank you! Can I ask for permission to PM you if I have any questions related to homelab/networking? You and I seem very similar in our scatterbrain-ness lol, so I figured it might make things easier if that makes sense. I will definitely be doing more reading and research, the first link you provided seems like an absolute blessing of a resource.

Dude this is awesome, thanks for your comment! It’s exactly the type of engagement I was hoping for, someone to help with a few key concepts. I’ll definitely be taking your advice to heart it sounds like you’ve been through the ringer with your own setup

I agree with you that running OPNsense in a VM is less than ideal but I figured as it would only affect my lab, I can deal with the occasional outage and this is more so I can learn first before going all in on a solution such as a netgate, I appreciate the suggestion there too. I’m not dead set on OPNsense I just figured a gui would be easier to navigate and it looked nice. I haven’t heard of suricata and mirroring WAN connection to pfsense, that definitely makes sense.

As for the VLANs I’m not dead set on that in particular either, the switch I have supported it and it made the most sense as to how to segment my network in that way. So you are saying you can also segment a LAN connection with just a firewall? It would make sense as you can set rules as to how a device can communicate with other devices on the network, is it rather cumbersome to set it up in that way? And on VLAN performance I would assume that would not be a problem as I am the only user who would be connecting to my media server, unless I had a bunch of services sending and receiving shitloads of data essentially?

I really appreciate all your help! You definitely sound like you’ve been doing this for a decade haha, very useful stuff. I might pop back and ask more questions later if you don’t mind