Monument

If you have a fiber connection or notice packetloss/slowdowns after 9 minutes you may need to set:

net.link.ether.inet.max_age = 540

Oooooh.

I have the forgetting kind of ADHD, so I straight up don’t know what I do and don’t have. This could be handy in that regard.
But I also can’t really see myself using this because the debt of keeping it current would be a nightmare.

I just bought a Mac mini for $50 from a local university’s surplus store. I plan to use it as spare hdd space for another device (it came with a 1tb drive), but even being older, it’s still very capable.
Perhaps a similar device could work for you?

So I recently(ish) went through this - migrating from consumer hardware to rolling my own.
Here’s what I did:

I bought a mini-PC router and loaded OPNsense onto it.
I needed wireless AP’s in some odd places, so I bought a pair of POE-powered Netgear WAX620 AP’s because they were a decent price, and a 2.5G POE+ Switch.
I probably would not go with Netgear again. They try to lock you into their cloud (subscription) platform. I don’t dig it. I would probably also not go with a POE switch unless I had to, because it adds a lot to the cost.
If I had planned better, I’d have waited until a decent older switch became available from a local surplus source. (The local university has a public surplus site that sometimes has interesting and cheap networking gear.)
If you plan to set up VLANs, make sure your switches are up to the task.

Humans are social animals. If you can’t rizz your bosses to promote you and your coworkers to help you, then you’re stuck and alone.