Mikrotik

Part 5 ended on a confession: AdGuard on the home server is now critical infrastructure. If that container goes sideways — a bad update, a docker compose down at the wrong moment, the server hanging on a kernel upgrade — every device on the trusted VLANs loses DNS. Internet stops. The household notices in roughly four seconds.

The traditional answer is “buy a Raspberry Pi.” I didn’t want to, and the router had a better idea anyway.

Nextcloud uploads were fine. Just fine. The kind of fine that makes you suspicious.

I’d just gotten gigabit fiber installed, and instead of everything feeling faster, the stack felt the same as it had on the old 5G router line. Browsing the photo library still had a half-beat of lag. Opening Paperless still felt like a coffee opportunity. Either I’d wasted money on the upgrade or something about my architecture was wasting the bandwidth on my behalf.

Spoiler: option two.

New house, structured cabling already in the walls, and after months of waiting — the fiber was finally in. The technician handed me a dangling RJ45 and said “good luck.” My consumer router had no idea what was coming.

This was supposed to be the easy part. I had a plan. I had a repo of scripts. I had three weekends of reading about VLANs.