talkingpumpkin

Personally, I would sell everything and get a used PC on ebay (a small "minipc" one, unless space for hard disks is needed).

Take a look at what you could buy on ebay just by selling off the nvidia card.

why is your network like this?

Well, at the moment my network is actually flat :)

This is an experiment I'm doing because I wanted to have all the management stuff on a different subnet (eg. adguard dns is on the "regular" subnet everyone uses, but its web interface is on the special subnet only select devices can talk to).

Of course (like with most stuff in my homelab), it's not like I really have a super-compelling security reason to that, it's mostly that I wondered "what if?" :D

Oh. the ping option you are referring to is -I (upper case) and takes either an interface name or an ip. I did try giving a .10/24 IP to the PC and the results were consistent with scenario 1 (pings where source and destination are on the same subnet work, pings acrrss subnets don't), so I didn't mention that in the OP

I don't think I quite explained the situation well enough: my server only has 1 ethernet port (same as my PC), otherwise I wouldn't have bothered with vlans (well, I would still have bothered, since my house still only has one "backbone" cable running through it, but I would have configured it on the switches only).

Anyway... a few of the things you say/imply go against my understanding of networking, so one of us would better go back RTFM as you suggest :) (just kidding - most probably I just don't understand what you mean)

Thanks! Forwarding is disabled. I don't want the server to steal the router's job :)

So the request goes trough but the replies are discarded ? That could actually be it!

I think there was an option to allow that... I'll search it and give it a try. Thanks!

I tried dropping the default routes (one at a time) and it doesn't make a difference, which isn't (I think) surprising as all traffic is local as far as the server in scenario 1 is concerned. Also IIUC only the default gateway with the lowest metric actually counts.

If going the route of a backup solution, is it feasible to install OpenWRT on all of my devices, with the expectation that I can do some sort of automated backups of all settings and configurations, and restore in case of a router dying?

My two cents: use a "full" computer as your router (with either something like OPNsense or any "regular" linux distro if you don't need the GUI) and OpenWRT on your access points.

Unless you use the GUI and backup/restore the configuration (as you would with proprietary firmwares), OpenWRT is frankly a pain to configure and deploy. At the moment I'm building custom images for all my devices, but (next time™) I'm gonna ditch all that, get an x86 router and just manually manage OpenWRT on my wifi APs (I only have two and they both have the same relatively straightforward config).

It’s a pain that I know can be solved with buying dedicated access points (…right?)

Routers and access points are just computers with network interfaces (there may be level-2-only APs, but honestly I've never heard of any)... most probably your issue is that the firmware of your "routers as access points" doesn't want to be configured as a dumb AP.

Does it still? Looks like the bubble is about to explode

How much data are we talking about?

A free mega.nz account should be fine for everything except family fotos and legally obtained music/movies.

Not sure I'm getting the issue here (what does "join table" mean in the scope of JSON/XML?), but... doesn't how you lay out your data in JSON/XML file have zero impact in your application's queries? You won't be querying the JSON - you'll be loading data from it into memory and query the memory.

I last used it a good while ago (like, 10yrs?), so you'll have to verify how what I am about to say applies to current versions (it probably does).

Jasper is an old-school, enterprisey tool similar to Crystal Reports that attempts to give you a WYSIWYG editor for building your reports.

All in all, I'd say that it might be good if you have a reporting department full of people that only do reports and you don't want to train as programmers. If the ones doing the reports are gonna be actual programmers, they'll be much better off generating html/latex/whatever and converting that to pdf.