I've been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/
I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it's been solid ever since.
I would make sure the adapter you're using (internal or USB) supports AP mode. Most intel ones don't: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000030429/wireless.html
Secret Hitler is CC 4.0 and is really fun. They have a print and play version you can download on the website for free.
I'm partial to mikrotik gear, the CRS305 has 4 sfp+ ports for around $150.
There came an echo by big giant circles.
Wow that sounds terrible... Especially with encouraging employers to increase birth rates, a lot of sexual assault/harassment is going to be swept under the rug.
Both opnsense and pfsense allow custom DNS entries so you still have that as an option. Probably the other options do too but you'll just have to verify.
But if you want to keep it simple I would just keep the pihole as a separate device. A lot of the built in options aernt quite as easy to setup and don't have the best UI compared to pihole IMO.
Most of the more advanced gateways have some sort of DNS filtering built in. Opnsense has an adguard plugin, pfsense has pfblocker-ng, openwrt has a few different options, Unifi and mikrotik both have solutions too I think. Usually you can just load the same block list that pihole uses into the filtering software and you are good to go.
If you want the most flexibility and want to use the same hardware for both gateway/DNS and want to try out different DNS/router solutions a hypervisor would give you the most options. But it would also be the most complicated.
I've been in the closed beta since February and I can vouch for this game being awesome. It's been a great way to encourage me to take my dogs on walks and stay healthy. I definitely recommend checking it out.
To the dev, your game has motivated me to learn flutter/dart. I've been working with it for four months now and I'm getting close to finishing my first app, so thank you for the inspiration!
Another solution is to use NAT on the router. NAT all traffic from the client network 11.0/24 to the routers IP on the server network 10.0/24.
That way when the server sees the ICMP echoes on its 10.102 network it will look like it came from the router and send the reply back together router instead out its other interface.
Are you sure you are typing the address in correctly on android/ios? 198.162.x.x isnt part of private IP space.
I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to "self-host" the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.
For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don't take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).
I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.
It takes work to get setup, and it's important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it's quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.
While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.