If you haven’t played Enderal it’s worth a playthrough. It’s a free total conversion mod of Skyrim.

I steered away from replacing my router with a PC and got an ER-X and virtualized everything else including TrueNAS on an old office PC. Having PCI-E slots helps with stability a ton when virtualizing and my setup has 64gb DDR3 which was cheap.

Ubiquiti APs are typically the homeLab standard and work great especially with multiple APs. You can start with turning your existing router to AP mode and replace with APs later.

For stability, you can create a “test network” on the ER-X. This is an incredibly useful unofficial guide to setup ER-X with multiple lan networks, APs and more. Then create redundancy with docker containers on a Pi. (put DNS server on proxmox system and a second on the Pi so if one goes down, DNS works).

For your home assistant question, does the backups or copy/paste data folder not meet your needs?

If space isn’t an issue, getting a cheap office surplus machine like a Dell Optiplex SFF line for ~$100 US vs the USFF so that it supports low profile PCI-E for a hba card for more storage, or nvidia quadro p400 for better encoding at like $30-50.

It will probably use a bit more wattage, especially with more HDDs, but still should be around 50w idle for even the old systems.

Cloudflare has DDoS protection but it can’t stop everything 100% of the time. According to the admins, the attackers are very familiar with how lemmy works and are using this knowledge to overwhelm resources. This isn’t just a simple script kiddy or bonnet for hire but likely points to someone that has worked within the lemmy community.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/what-is-a-ddos-attack/

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/glossary/web-application-firewall-waf/