In this regard: here is a comparison of all the Lenovo tinys: https://github.com/a-little-wifi/TinySecrets

Zigbee2mqtt can do scenes, no problem.

The only thing you miss is the hue app.

But you can buy a 10-20€ zigbee stick and connect them directly to home assistant. No hue bridge or account required.

Do you want the data to be only stored once or twice? Or would it be an option to sync everything? This would be the easiest. Just set up 3 individual servers, set up syncthing between them, done.

It would mean that all server need enough storage though.

Matter itself is just the protocol, not the wireless standard. There are lots of matter over WiFi devices, for those you don’t need this additional adapter, as they will connect to your WiFi router.

Thread is a wireless standard which is almost like zigbee, that is why there are some adapters that support both.

But thread border routers are also a thing in lots of devices. For example if you have an Apple TV, this can be used as a gateway with home assistant without additional hardware.

Matter is not really big yet.

For zigbee adapters, take a look here: https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/guide/adapters/

+1 for fiber. Also because there are really thin fiber cables available (like <1mm in diameter) and with a bidirectional transceiver you can literally run a cable in the corner of two walls and hide it with just some acrylic compound and paint.

There is also POE over two unshielded copper wires.

If you lose connection, I would imagine that the connection to these servers would not be established and therefore no authentication information would be send, no?

I bought a HPE microserver gen10 plus and installed unraid on it, works perfectly. Truenas would also be an option.

It has 4 drive bays, 4 1 gig Ethernet ports and 1 pciex16

I actually bought unraid before it became a subscription. And I must say, i really like it.

I am currently looking into Proxmox to build a small cluster to prevent critical services from becoming unavailable whenever I do stupid things… but… compared to unraid the learning curve and ease of use is much more brutal.

Just buy two!

Who needs a domain anyway

The last refurbished drives I bought were all in the range of 10€/TB

As an anecdote: I have one system (x86) with pi-hole and unbound in a docker, and a secondary raspberry pi with pi-hole running on bare metal. The docker system (although much more performant in general) has a lower latency as the raspberry bare metal install.

I have all these services in docker as well (although not with the docker compose file here) and they run perfectly fine with a very low resource footprint.

Sounds like OP is a teacher at a school. Schools very seldom have It departments, even in this day and age…

Thanks!!

I am currently also looking for a 10“ rack. Where did you get this one? It sounds like you are from Germany (at least according to the sticker) and so am I.

Wow, it even includes plenty of 3d file types which are quite hard to actually find converters for.