:-)

Let me guess, ".*@.*\..*"?

I ended up with an Opnsense box. It's an m920q (i5-8500), with riser card and a dual SFP+ nic in it. All in, it was less than 200 bucks (now it would be closer to three). I ended up with a cheap, Chinese "media converter" (from aliexpress because the same thing on amazon is 3x the price) that just had two SFP+ ports on it. That let me go from an SPF+ copper ethernet module to a DAC and not dump a bunch of heat into the 1L pc.

I have to say that the functionality made it a worth while investment: traffic shaping, wireguard and the like have been mostly a joy. And the documentation for Opnsense made the setup and use (mostly) easy.

The extreme difficulty of setting up networking and routers is (obviously?) a weird endgame result of how companies and safety and capitalism and restriction intersect* and given the relatively insane regulatory ideas we're seeing these days, time for another look at all of this.

*edit, and not, e.g. an inherent property of "networking technology," it does NOT have to be this hard.