I'm currently running a Xeon E3-1231v3. It's getting long in the tooth, supports only 32GB RAM, and has only 16 PCIe lanes. I've been butting up against the platform limitations for a couple of years now, and I'm ready to upgrade. I've been running this system for ~10yrs now.

I'm hoping to future proof the next system to also last 8-10 years (where reasonable, considering advancements in tech and improvements in efficiency), but I'm hitting a wall finding CPU candidates.

In a perfect world, I'd like an Intel with iGPU for QuickSync (HWaccel for Frigate/Immich/Jellyfin), AND I would like the 40+ PCIe lanes that the Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs offer.

With only my minimum required PCIe devices I've surpassed the 20 lanes available on desktop CPU's with an iGPU:

• Dual m.2 for Proxmox ZFS mirror (guest storage) - in addition to boot drive (8 lanes)
• LSI HBA (8 lanes)
• Dual SFP+ NIC (8 lanes)

Future proofing:

High priority

• Dedicated GPU (16 lanes)

Low priority

• Additional dual m.2 expansion (8 lanes)
• USB expansions for simplified device passthrough (Coral TPU, Zigbee/Zwave for Home Aassistant, etc) (4 lanes per card) - this assumes the motherboard comes with at least 4-ports
• Coral TPU PCIe (4 lanes?)

Is there anything that fulfills both requirements? Am I being unreasonable or overthinking it? Is there a solution that adds GPU hardware acceleration to the Xeon Silver line without significantly increasing power draw?

Thanks!

Hey all, not a lot of activity here yet, but hopefully someone can offer some advice!

I'm having major regrets following migration from Core to Scale. The migration via update file went smoothly, but immediately apparent on starting up Scale, all of my SMB shares were broken. Both Linux and Windows clients are unable to connect.

I have since tried creating new users/groups (I noticed that my normal user and group with id's 1000 had been changed to 1001 in Scale), stripping ACL's and recreating, and deleting the shares and recreating. Failure to connect on each attempt.

Is there something I'm missing relating to the migration that prevents SMB from working? I'm not well versed in the inner working, or shell command available for troubleshooting, so most of this has been attempted through the GUI.

Also, I realise I have shot myself in the foot. Like an idiot, I saw the feature flag update message when Scale first started. I clicked through and upgraded without even thinking. I realised what I had done when I restored my Core VM from the previous day - the pool was offline, with zpool import showing an unsupported feature message. So any path back to Core is off the cards I think.

Any help is appreciated...

EDIT:

I think I have found the culprit. I downloaded the debug info and had a look at the SMB config (specifically net_config.txt). For some bizarre reason, the SMB interface had bound to an old IP address (two or three home network revisions ago - not used in many years).

[GLOBAL]

interfaces = 127.0.0.1 192.168.0.200

By selecting the systems current IP address in the optional "Bind IP Addresses" field in the global SMB service settings (under advanced), I've been able to rebind it to the correct address, and I have access (tested in Linux only so far)! phew...