Hell that could just be the entry level position for all we know.

Mythos autonomously escaped a secured sandbox environment

Doesn’t sound like it was secure.

The other thing I tried was deploying an Element server so they could talk to family on their own without risk of exposure to the world at large, but ended up abandoning this.

Matrix is a PIA to configure properly, it is nice to have once you got it running but you’ll end up spinning like 8 different services (if you use Docker) for all the functionality to work.

Additionally, I recommend unbound for those already on pi-hole.

Never could get unbound to work properly, it would always knock my internet out to the point of troubleshooting for hours, whether that be Pi-Hole, OpenSense or Technitium I’ve always had issues with unbound.

As much as I like hosting my own services, I want them to be reliable.