I can highly recommend taking a look at the traffic going across your network as well. With an OpenWRT or Ubiquiti router, you may even be able to mirror your WAN port to something Wireshark can see - it's definitely eye-opening.
I've been thinking about getting a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro or a similar setup and would love to look at the traffic there. Right now I just have an Orbi router with two satellites.
I'm sure there are cheaper options with a port mirroring function, but one of the entry level Ubiquiti switches plus a controller running in a VM would work, too. Hmm, I should definitely investigate cheaper options.
Yeah, I've thought about other options, including running a lot of things in a VM, because of that. Plus I usually like to tinker and learn. But I have so many other things on my plate right now that I'm not sure I want to take that on too. So having something that's prosumer that I don't have to mess with as much would be nice. I just wish I lived somewhere where I could find more second-hand networking equipment!
This is much riskier though! If you happen to have any running services, or are missing any updates, your laptop may quickly find itself part of a botnet, or your shared disks shared more widely than you intended[0].
[0] Back in the Web 1.0 era, there were lots of Windows PCs connected directly to the Internet with file and printer sharing enabled. People wrote search engines and download tools for scraping them.
