Everytime I mention Linux in the outside world, people's brains freeze and then I get questions. I need a better social circle.

Anything Lexus. Mostly luxury brand SUV (Lexus, Cadillac, BmW, those trying to be cool Denali shit). Sprinkle in some "modified" diesel trucks and we have a party.

I'm here!

Most of those options come down to what you want from them. TrueNAS, Openmediavault, and Unraid are storage options with the ability to run VMs or Containers. Hypervisors (ESXI, Proxmox, etc) run VMs and containers, but are not really designed for storage. It gets a bit muddy since there is a lot of overlap. You could run TrueNAS as a VM on a hypervisor.

I keep things separate. My storage runs bare metal storage OS (UnRaid and another TrueNAS). My server handles all the heavy services and Internet facing services. For a homelab, go nuts. Try an all-in-one server. If you have equipment, try multiple things. I've ran all different storage on my server to see what I liked best. Just make sure to have routine backups no matter what options you choose. Nothing is worse than a major failure and losing it all.

That is currently what I am using. Been getting used to a new app and navigation of the fediverse.

Thanks for the reply. Mine would need to sit in a garage and would be prone to ambient temperatures. I was thinking of using one of the USB ports to power a small laptop cooling pad/fan. Just not sure of the typical CPU temp on these. I do have a pi b3+ in the same area that runs about 47°c even with a small fan.

Yes!! I have many switches! I see this is a Cisco, so you will learn how to run a managed network using Cisco CL. Making that work with the TPLink will be fun and educational. Pretty nice!

I use OPNSense with some older Aruba I got from a local IT guy that upgraded an office. I had to update the firmware and learn CLI for HP, but not bad considering price was nice. I would recommend to get something not consumer if you really want to get invested.

Are cables running behind the drawers an issue? I would imagine running them through and keeping them from catching on the rails would be a concern.

I've been eyeing one of these. Just haven't pulled the trigger. Been looking at these and other 'lesser known' brands. How do they handle heavy workloads? Any temperature issues being that they are passive?

I hope so, r/homelab has been a valuable resource for my home projects.

Serve the home recently did a write up on a HP Elite mini 600 G9. Apparently there is an adapter, HP Flex IO V2 module, that adds a 2.5gb port. Worth a look, but I would just get a SFF pc to have more pci slots and options.

https://www.servethehome.com/perfect-project-tinyminimicro-pushing-a-1l-pc-as-a-server-concept-intel-hp-sabrent-crucial/

Not sure if this was resolved or not, but did you check for static IPs on devices? I ran into an issue when setting up the SG108E where even though I had Linux set to DHCP, it was assigning the manual entry. Rookie mistake 😞. Once I cleared the manual entries and cleared the static IPs from DHCP leases it cleared.