plateee

With torrents, it is generally considered to be a faux pas to not upload as well as download. Most private trackers will require that you maintain some sort of positive ratio in order to be in good standing.

In order to upload, you need to expose ports from your download client out to the internet so that others can reach you.

For news groups, you only download, so although your system is still able to reach the internet, your download client does not expose any ports to the internet.

Edit: I suppose what I was trying to communicate is that with news groups, you are at less risk for being nabbed for piracy than torrents. The nature of the torrent protocol means that you are uploading (or at least making available to upload) any data that you have already downloaded. For news groups, there is no upload.

As a bonus, if you go with newsgroups, you don’t have to expose anything to the internet!

Maybe I ditch my plans and just establish a VLAN for IoT and guests.

That’s a good starting point. Keep IoT away from your primary vlan (for all things holy don’t use VLAN ID 1). You can limit your outbound traffic for that vlan more easily if you want to cut your smart things off from the Internet.

Guest WiFi/vlan can be just a straight shot to the internet, probably no need for visitors to get to your internal services.

Eventually, you could add a DMZ where any Internet available systems like your VPN - with specific firewall rules only permitting VPN to specific locations inside your primary vlan.

It’s only the mini Pepsi cans iirc, so they aren’t as load bearing as I’d like. God willing, I’ll upgrade to fanta boxes one day.

A little late to the party, but here’s mine.