We didn’t have many CDs even after CD players had become pretty popular so we had Columbia House. We would typically the the 3 CDs that you bought for a special price from a catalog and nothing more. It was helpful in getting a decent collection pretty quickly though. Almost all of my CDs as a kid came from them.
You can do TCP proxying with nginx but many of the same features available in haproxy are behind the paywall. In nginx, layer 4 connections are dealt with through streams. You can do both TCP and UDP. I stick with haproxy for TCP streams with very few exceptions. HAproxy is most definitely more robust for situations where you have a pool of upstream servers. For single upstream instances, it’s not terrible. Most of the features I would use for better control of how the failover and balancing would work isn’t available in the open source nginx.
This is how I typically approach things for my use. If I am going to a place where just being there is the destination, like near a beach or a house with a private pool, AirBNB is my go to choice. If I just need to sleep because the destination for a trip is like an amusement park or somewhere where I plan on being gone almost all day, then a hotel is ideal. If my vacation includes a lot of time just hanging out, hanging out in a hotel sucks.
I’m in a similar boat except I just do everything on standard Docker containers but so do use Telegraf, Influx, and Grafana for everything. I’ve gone mostly to Discord notifications on any alerts. If I run into any problem scenarios, I figure out how to monitor it and add it via Telegraf and add an alert. I’m still just using Grafana alerts but it works fine for my home lab.
Even better if I can automate fixes to those problems. One of the best things I did was monitoring all of my network devices and all major hops. If I have internet or network issues, I know exactly where the problem is without having to troubleshoot. Lots of dpinger and shell scripts to input data to Telegraf.