Servers are just expensive hardware. You can accomplish 95% with a consumer grade desktop without all the extra power/heat/noise and dependencies on specific hardware.

You should buy both. Don’t mess around with VIP UAT.

Seeed meshtastic tracker card. The general purpose version uses more battery than I’d like but you can get one that only does tracking or turn off most of features to get more than a few days of life.

It only works if you have some other meshtastic nodes around, but it doesn’t need to be a lot and it’s getting to be more popular.

Reolink might be another to consider.

OpenVAS is a vulnerability scanner that appears to be open source.

Metasploit is another that I think is free and might be open source.

True but it’s designed to be on networks that don’t have internet.

Tplink Omada doesn’t need a cloud connection. There’s plenty of other reasons to not like Omada but it’s something to consider. It’s also dirt cheap.

If any service has only username and password instead of mfa or password less then it’s not safe.

You also didn’t mention if you have automated patching or immutable backups enabled.

Even large streaming services drop their servers close to the users to make the experience good. They just do better at scaling.

You could federated authentication so only one ldap service is maintained. You could also sync media from one device to the other so you don’t need to manually update both.