systemd’s networkd has a built-in DHCP server; check option ‘DHCPServer’ and section ‘DHCPServer’ for that (same man page as above).

Is that true in Debian? If so, cool. I did not know that.

I’m happy to answer specific questions as you dig into it. :) Good luck.

This is extremely possible and I have done a lot of stuff like it (I set up my first home built Linux firewall over 20 years ago). You do want to get some kind of multiport network card (or multiple network cards… usb -> ethernet adapters can do OK filling in in a pinch). It also gives you a lot of power if you want to do specific stuff with specific connections (sub netting, isolation of specific hosts, etc).

There’s a lot of ways to do it, but the one I’m most familiar with is just to use IP tables.

The very first thing you want to do is open up /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward and change the 0 to a 1 to turn on network forwarding.

You want to install bridge-utils and isc-dhcp-server (or some other DHCP server). Google or get help from an LLM to configure them, because they’re powerful and there’s a lot of configs. Ditto if you want it to handle DNS. But basically what you’re going to do (why you need bridge-utils) is you’re going to set up a virtual bridge interface and then add all the various NICs you want on your LAN side into it (or you can make multiple bridges or whatever… lots of possibilities).

Your basic iptables rule is going to be something like

iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o enp1s0 -j MASQUERADE, but again there’s lots of possible IP tables rules so read up on those.

I’m working with some Rust right now that is 100% a big mess…

It’s consistently either the Rust or the Docker components that fail to build. In fairness, it’s a VERY big and complex application.

That reputation has entirely been created by the media frenzy over busting the worst kinds of criminals.

Oh they’re all using the same technology? Yeah of course they are, because that’s the technology that works the best. It has so many fucking use cases.

Funny that the media frenzy is hitting a fever pitch just as we most desperately need powerful tools for opposing fascism. Almost like that’s not really a coincidence.

This makes me want to implement a programming language as an alternate tabletop magic system. Maybe give my players runes to experiment with and let them figure out it’s a programming language.

Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like “I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint).” When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like “No… I don’t use anything like that… wait… yes I do! I just don’t use a prebuilt solution!”