Have done something similar, you’ll discover the joy of have no internet while you do server maintenance, upgrades or disaster recovery and worst case, hardware failures.

Having internet and filesharing on one nic means internet will suffer while the nic is saturated.

Ensure your other VMs are adequately delayed at initial boot, as that can cause weird things that need DHCP to be available

Otherwise I never had issue running the router as a VM.

Steam is a private company, not publicly traded and has no VC funding.

VC funding and potential IPO normally means enshittification is inevitable, as they will eventually need to make insane profits by turning the screws on its users, as their business model wasn’t self sustaining.

Lol, I’m the server owner, so I am expected to pay to allow multiple accounts. Which is my exact complaint.

I had issue with offline usage, and found, with time, it only got worse. My lan clients eventually stopped showing my server unless I logged into my Plex account first. Maybe things changed since, my experience, Plex became overly dependant on a connection to their servers.

To little to late, I’ve since moved to Jellyfin, which solved my frustrations. I have no interest in moving back to Plex.

Plex also uses token based login that expires after 48hours, if you don’t have an active internet connection

A quick look, it seems hardware transcoding is locked behind Plex pass…

If you say so, but my clients started refusing to locate my Lan server, but worked fine once I logged into my Plex account. I’ve never struggled since moving to jellyfin. No chance I’ll ever go back to Plex

You need an internet connection to connect to a offline LAN Plex server… Just so unessessery, otherwise it doesn’t find your server (I was quite confused on that one, when that started happening) Plus having to pay for multiple user accounts, all just seemed like it was heading towards user extortion. It also lacked hardware transcoding at that point in time, which isn’t a huge issue, but did make it harder to run if you had a client that didn’t support a specific codec.

While jellyfin requires zero internet to be functional and login, supported hardware transcoding before plex and has multiple user accounts usage out of the box, at zero cost.

I stopped using Plex shortly after they started forcing logging in with your online Plex account to connect to LAN only based server. The writing was on the wall all those years ago. Who wants to be locked out of their media when the internet is offline, completely defeated the point of self hosting local infrastructure

Jellyfin, while lacking a bit when I first migrated, has continued improved over the years and it has been joyful to use. Plus Jellyfin supported hardware transcoding before Plex did, which was a gripe I had with Plex at the time.

I stream from my server remotely and share with Family without hassle. I dunno where Plex is trying to go, glad I bailed long ago

Industrial HVAC systems use water towers to cool the hot side of system. The method relies on physics of evaporative cooling to reduce temperatures of the water. The process requires water to be absorbed by atmosphere, to drive the cooling effect. (Lower the humidity, the higher the cooling efficiency is, as the air as greater potential to absorb and hold moisture).

The method is somewhat similar to power station cooling towers. Or even swamp coolers. (An odd example would be, experimental PC water cooling builds with ‘bong coolers’, which are evaporative coolers, built from drainage pipes)