I found a nifty bit of software out there called ProxMox. A fully function VM system for free. Sold.
I shut down wasat, took out it's disks, threw new ones from the pile in, and installed ProxMox 6. Then immediately turned around, built a NetBSD 8.0 VM onto it, and rebuilt my DNS server onto that.
Once I realized how super cool it was, I was hooked. I dug around ebay, and found a pair of Diamond BT10 Sapphire's for $50 a pop. These are basically supermicro Xeon machines in a 1U package. I ordered both, got some sliding rails as well, and now I have a 3-node cluster with Ceph.
This let me start throwing up VM's like crazy. I built a piwigo server, a zoneminder server, plex, etc etc.
Step 2 Was the aging firewall.
NetBSD made me sad. For 7.0 they decided to ditch pf, and created nbf, which, I'm sure is better firewall code than pf, but I absolutely hate fiddling with the firewall. I have a dual DSL setup with 9 static IP's and a bazillion reverse NATs all over the place. I really didn't want to rewrite it all from scratch again (because they just switched from ipfilter, ugh)
So pfSense. I hate firewalls so much, that I just wanted an easier way to hack at it, and I wanted pretty graphs for grafana, because I am addicted to graphs. After about 2 days of horrid struggle, I managed to get pfSense working with my setup. This is not due to a failure in pfSense, rather, my setup is just too complex.
Finally, my home automation software gnahst, was running on NetBSD 7.99 on a pair of Raspberry PI 1's. They were severely underpowered, and kept causing pain for me. They had to go. 2 new PI 3b+'s, both with Debian Buster got installed, and the main gnhast server got pushed onto a VM. The PI's handle all the physical devices, like the onewire and USB connection to my alarm panel. The VM handles everything that is networked, like the VenStar thermostats, etc.
Now I'm cooking with oil.