Basically what the title says. Someone I know is building a house and they want all sorts of security and privacy added benefits one could have with no hold backs.
This post basically serves as a place for everyone to come contribute ideas, hardware, and software, even self hosting is possible to increase the safety, security, and privacy of the home. So feel free to contribute thoughts and ideas but please include how to implement your concept if you can!
Plug and play is preferred but a little reasonable amount of self hosting could be done, with a preference on mechanical hardware where possible but not a hard set requirement.
While money isn’t an major issue within reason, be realistic and preferably eco friendly. Thanks everyone ahead of time!
I am a FOSS guy so I’d just configure Debian or Ubuntu to do most of the server, media center, desktop, and laptop stuff. Smart Phones Google Pixel 8a or another a series flashed with GrapheneOS. For network I would look at PfSense, OPNSense, OpenWrt, or DD-WRT devices. I have DD-WRT devices but have they do not get updates sadly, but there are some vendors that base their devices on DD-WRT. Not sure which ones. ASUS? Buffalo? Is there a list somewhere?
The other direction is to go more commercial which is probably what you want. Lot of people like Synology products. In particular they have nice NAS products (which actually can run other services too) which should be fine if you just run them on the LAN. If you want to connect while traveling, setup some sort of VPN. Do not expose any of this stuff to the WAN. For network devices I would consider Netgate, I think they have some PfSense firewalls. Some people seem to like Ubiquiti stuff.
I personally have generally favored Netgear but as I said, I mostly have just re-flashed with DD-WRT but am thinking of doing something different at least with regard to my boundary router. It has gotten so we all need to have our network devices rapidly updated, especially exposed ones like the boundary router.