This year I spent more money than I should have on computers. Of course, I am happy about that.

First, I bought a Beelink mini PCs with two NICs so I could set up an OPNsense router. My primary goal was to have a router/firewall that was up-to-date with security patches. That has been a rousing success. OPNsense, if anything, updates too often. My secondary goal was to have something I could set up as a VPN or proxy server so I could access my own stuff while I am away form home. I am unhappy to report that I could never get Wireguard working properly, and have given up on it for the time being.

I liked that PC so much that I bought another one to use as an app server. I installed Proxmox on it and have been having fun setting up numerous services in LXC containers using Proxmox VE Helper-Scripts. I set up LXC containers for Jellyfin (a media server and streamer), Paperless-ngx (a document manager for scanned papers), and several tools for downloading Linux ISOs and the like. It has been pretty easy to set up. The hardest part was getting all the LXC containers to connect to my NAS file shares, but even that was not very hard. (I do have many years of basic homelab-style Linux administration under my belt.)

The experience has been so good that I decided to buy a laptop to mess around with Linux on the desktop. I bought a 5-year-old used Thinkpad. It cost way less than $500, was in like-new condition, and runs Fedora 42 Workstation perfectly. I have been having more fun computing than I have for a long time.