He is small. Especially for a ginger cat. In my experience, they tend to be bigger. He’s about 7 human years old now and still only that size.

Scratches are his favourite thing. He was a rescue cat. His mum got ill from slug pellets and died. 😞 He is called Hobbes, and he is well loved.

Do your access rules work in both directions? Do you have any strange routing going on? Do you need to configure a static route for the returning traffic?

Sorry, knowing very little about your setup means i can only suggest vague possibilities based on networks i work with.

HDD for long term storage. More reliable, has a higher number (essentially infinite assuming the drive never fails) of read/writes before failing. Cheaper and higher capacity than any ssd or m.2. Also if you dont keep applying a small electrical charge to an m.2 they eventually lose the data. HDD doesnt really lose data as easily. Also data recovery is easier with HDD. Finally you know when a HDD is on its way out as it will show slower write speeds and become noisier etc.

I used to work in a service desk looking after maybe… 4000 desktops and 2000 laptops for a hospital and the amount of ssd and m.2 failures we had was very costly.