According to the VA, the proper classification is "mental defective".

Extended family, maybe there is a cousin or child of a close friend. You have to make an effort to maintain a relationship, but you should find people you can trust, stay in touch, broach the uncomfortable conversations, and make legal preperations..

Even children and relatives can't all be trusted. My wife's parents always wanted her to manage their healthcare and financial concerns as the aged, but they did little pre-planning and when it came down to it, there was too much opportunity for her older siblings to step in and strip their assets.
They are not in a terrible situation, but had they been willing to accept a small amount of help earlier, and address legal issues we brought up, they would be in a much better place.

Bingo, IT is a catchall and alot of the work assigned belongs in the secretary pool.

Yeah, this way he can burn through his $50k in a month or two.

There is some truth in this, but it will really hurt you in ongoing support and any upgrade paths. Although, most HPC's should be run in a silo'ed environment and replaced rather then upgraded piecemeal.

There are so many components to manage, working with individual vendors, who will just blame each other, is a nightmare. You definitely need to have a comprehensive vendor who has the clout to manage this. HPC clusters that are used, require constant attention.

I currently have three HPC clusters I manage. Those things definitely move some air. If I open the mesh rack door, without holding it, the air flow will slam it into me pretty hard. It's just a light door, but it's full of holes and the air still pushes it hard.

I've done pfsense and routerOS, pfsense is way easier and the documentation is clearer. If you do it right, with an embedded box, electricity is a wash. If you throw it on a virtual server you are already running, you probably come out ahead.

pfsense, properly configured, can stand against any commercial product. For dynamic IP's, openVPN works great. I have used both mikrotik and pfsense and configured them such that you plug them into any network and they immediately tunnel home with a OpenVPN. Don't bother with swan or the other ipsec or pptp solutions.

I always counsel people to stay away from SOHO equipment. It's not worth the hassle when you can get mikrotik, ubiquiti, or pfsense for the same or less. If you do go with a big name consumer router, at least make sure it supports openwrt.

I did some extensive pfsense openVPN work awhile back. It has since been replaced by a "managed" solution and I was gifted the old gear. If you want some inexpensive Alix equipment, hit me up. They handle pfsense and openvpn very well.

bingo, don't screw around with the ipsec garbage that's out there. Use openVPN and call it done. Monitoring / usage control is a different beast and can be easily handled on an appropriate router, which can be virtualized on an appropriate setup if necessary, or run on dedicated hardware. Something like pfsense supports logging and all sorts of filtering.

Instead of 2 cheap routers, I would use pfsense. It will do everything he is asking for. It will do captive portal, so I can cap bandwidth per user or device. It will give him logs and show per device usage. If he configures it, he can filter with several different plug-ins.

It will also act as an openvpn client or server.

Look no further then then the pending overtime regulation overhaul for a fix.

Yes, the replication procedure is enjoyable, but the replicant requires extensive training.