Most programmers earn a wage, not the full value of their labor.

So i should be able to get one cheap and put coreelec on it??

I backed up my configs, made snapshots, and rebuilt each VM from scratch. If I forgot to copy a cron script, i pulled it from the snapshot. It took a full Saturday, but it was a chance to apply everything ive learned the last 3 years and improve some architecture decisions I’d made when i was first learning. With proxmox, you can build a VM that has the basic things you’ll change on every machine (networking, docker, automatic updates, ssh keys, monitoring) and clone it for each server you need.

There are several DoH IP lists on github. Find one that is staying updated and use it as an alias to block them all

Exactly, and esp dev boards are super cheap which seemed like one of your goals

Not exactly sure of your use case, but maybe this cpuld work for you. I have a testbed workstation that i crash sometimes. I put the power on a shelly plug, bios set to power on after ac loss.

Problem is- how do I enter the disk encyption password remotely? And more importantly, how do i do it cheaply?

https://github.com/tobiaas/esp32-web-keyboard

I just adjusted the wifi config to join my network instead of broadcasting an AP.