What average consumer has hardware that’s actually capable of using more than 1Gbps?

I’m waiting for the L009UiGS-RM to be back in stock so I can try that out.

I doubt there is a much better solution, the huge rack mounted UPS are just tons of 12v batteries wired together. I would question why your batteries are dieing so frequently, I expect to get 5+ years out of mine with light use.

Shodan is a internet scanning website, it can monitor your IP for new ports open and some basic vulnerability stuff.

Burpsuite is a tool to capture network traffic, they are saying they use it to confirm all their services use end to end encryption for communication.

NGFW is next gen firewall and it’s just a firewall that’s able to do more than your basic in/out rules.

You could have the best of both worlds and then also use GitHub secrets as well. https://github.com/marketplace/actions/deploy-a-portainer-stack

One of my first projects would be to setup a small Linux box that I can ssh into remotely.

Why not just take the next step and setup tailscale? That way you can learn and also not have to worry about setting up a full security stack and everything for your DMZ.
Tailscale will let you create a virtual local network so that you don’t have to expose anything to the internet.

This is pretty cool, make sure you go to the GitHub for it to grab the docker compose file if you want to self host since most of the documentation seems to default to the hosted version.

I always thought the compose file is great for maintenance. You can always save the docker run commands elsewhere so at the end of the day it’s more of an orchestration choice.

They can be. I have a supermicro 2u server that has a 12 disk backplane that I stripped of its original mobo and fans and put in my own gear. Its pretty quiet once you replace all of the stock fans with noctua.