When we moved into our current home 3.5 years ago, I never thought a plumbing disaster would lead to a full-blown home network overhaul. But thanks to a reroute of every water pipe in the house, I got a golden opportunity to run CAT6 cables everywhere—and I went all-in with a Ubiquiti network, pfSense firewall, and enough VLANs to make my future self curse my past self.

For years, I limped along running the UniFi controller on my desktop “when I needed it.” Last weekend, I finally decided to fix that—by containerizing it on my home server. Of course, nothing in networking ever goes quite as planned, so what started as a 15-minute project turned into a DNS mystery, a stubborn device, and an unexpected pfSense upgrade.