I agree about the USB Ethernet dongle. Unless you only require short distance wifi range (eg hotel room temp router) the radio in the pi isn’t going to be enough

I built a pi4 router a few years ago, and it’s still running great, I recommend the project. But unfortunately I can’t find the HOWTO and it was before I started taking good notes. I assume your current router is a phone company supplied modem/router?

My setup is cable modem–>pi router–>switch–> old netgear router in Access point only mode

Being that your router/modem is upstream of router, I’m not sure if you could pass-through the WAN to the pi router, and pass back the LAN to the router/modem for the wifi… maybe someone on here can shed some light?

OK daddd (or mommm) it probably is time for me to test my backups haha

Yes this is in addition to the normal alarm. The light is incase I’m sleeping, as I may not hear the basement alarm going off. The notification is if I’m not home.

You had me at “number pad”

I didn’t mean to imply that Services actually broke. Only that they didn’t come back after a reboot. A clean reboot may have caused some of the same issues because, I’m learning as I go. Some services are restarted by systemctl, some by cron, some…manual. This is certainly a wake up call that I need standardize and simplify the way the services are started.