I left Plex as soon as they made it a pain to not use cloud logins.

Wtf? Why are you asking me to look g into MY system through your server? Get outta here.

10G SFP+ RJ45 modules - these are starting from 50$

Yeah I avoid 10g over rj45 whenever possible due to cost.

I bought two of the switches you mentioned. Two sfp+ nics.

Two DAC cables

Two single mode fiber sfp+ modules and a length of single mode fiber to connect my desktop on the top floor to the server in the basement.

Yes. It's a little pricey.. but I'm good until 100g becomes affordable in the home....

A simple syslog server is ready.

Look into ELK stack. I personally hate it but if you can learn it there's a chance you can build a career on it.

never liked pfsense.. the interface usually got in the way more than it helped. Ran a linux router for years..

These days i have mikrotik gear at the edge. (no they aren't insecure... all of the cve's you've heard about were publicly exposed admin interfaces...).

Bind, powerdns, dnsmasq.... You COULD do it with windows DNS server or even something like a mikrotik router....

AWS has route53.. but depending on your clients someone would be paying money...

Id probably look for someone like digitalocean or cloudflare that has an API and use that.... DNS is pretty simple... Until it's not.

I can’t get anything actually running!

Most of my time in my sysadmin work is sitting there staring at the screen reading error logs about why some new product isn't working.

make sure you ACTUALLY have a solid grasp of networking. dig into the osi model or the 3 layer dod model. Go further than "yup. encapsulation. got it". Look at the actual headers in layer 2 and layer 3. Figure out how packets get routed and how frames get forwarded. Look at how NAT actually mangles packets.

Understanding hos the traffic flows will make troubleshooting much easier.