Not a direct answer to your question, but assuming you have a switch that supports VLANs you don’t need a second ethernet port at all.

You’ll have to take my word for it, but I am pantslessly dancing in victory.

I read “I R Madlad” in the style of “I R Baboon”.

I’m on a variable rate electricity tariff and I use Home Assistant and iLO to power things on and off automatically, so most of the time it pulls 30-50W. At peak it pulls north of 1.5KW but that’s really rare.

Makes mine look boring.

Well a miscarriage is basically an abortion and an abortion is basically a murder.

/s, to be clear, but some people will say that sincerely and in some parts of the world they get to write the law.

No, it’s nothing sinister. Most user-facing business workstations run Windows and have a Windows COA or, more recently, have the Windows product key baked into firmware, so it’s easy-peasy for the seller to install a fresh, working copy of Windows. The Dell WYSE PCs are Thin Clients, which are used to access Windows (or another OS) running on another PC or a server somewhere so the Thin Client doesn’t have or need a license; this means it’s not easy for the seller to install a hassle-free version of Windows since it will immediately start pestering the user for a license and for novices they’ll assume the computer is broken and return it. The lightweight Thin Client OS they use is neither use nor ornament outside an enterprise settings so they don’t bother reinstalling that. Obviously the seller could install Linux but the majority of people who are okay with Linux would probably sneer and say “ugh, Distro X? I only use Distro Y” and reinstall anyway, so it’s easier just to sell it without an OS. Ask me how I know all this.

Edit to add: some thin clients do have strange architectures and use weird OSes but that’s not a concern here. Aside from size and specs, the only material difference between the WYSE 5070 and a “normal” PC is that the EFI will have limited configuration options, but unless you’re planning on installing Windows XP that’s probably not an issue.

Edit to add to edit to add: I just found this https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/wyse/5070/. It’s a detailed breakdown of the device and mentions that it could be speced with an onboard SPF NIC? That’s crazy. It also shows someone modding a second NVMe drive into it.

Yeah, that’s pretty good. The only things I’d be wary of with that particular listing are that it doesn’t come with a power supply (these normally take laptop-style PSUs) and 64GB of storage might not be enough once you start to get to grips with it though you could easily upgrade the NVMe SSD (or hook up an external USB drive).

But aside from that it’s a smart little system and will handle a the setup I described with no issues. The J4105 can be sluggish with multitasking in a desktop environment but for ‘headless’ setups it’s excellent and uses very little power.

No.

Unless there’s something about the RPi that you really want - GPIO, say - it’s not a good choice, especially not the 1GB model you mentioned. Virtually any used desktop or laptop PC from the last fifteen years will be more useful; if you’ve not done so already, search EBay for “USFF”. Those are desktop PCs the size of paperback books. Businesses love them and have them in fleets which means they tend to get cycled out naturally after a few years; the marketplace is full of them and can be had for €30 and up. Unlike a RPi 3, they usually come with storage included (and a proper SSD/HD rather than an SD card), a good quality power supply, plenty of I/O and, if course, a nice solid protective case.

Example: https://ebay.us/m/TxL4yR

Slap PROXMOX on that and you’ll have the seed of a solid home lab. With 8GB RAM you’ll have enough to run VMs for OpenWRT, Home Assistant, Yuno Host, and still have enough resources left over for your Debian tinkering box. Plus, by using PROXMOX you do away with the need for a KVM since you can either SSH into the VM or use PROXMOX’s web UI to access the console and use a GUI if that’s more your speed.

I have a lot of time for Eaton kit. As others have said, not cheap but seems to work well. I’ve not used APC in a while but they used to make good hardware, even if their software was dogshit.

Yeah, me too. Two VPSs (one Helsinki, the other Nuremberg) each with a couple of IPs. Been running perfectly for years aside from when I fuck them up.

I don’t know if you’re asking seriously, but if you are the answer is: Enterprise manageability and accountability. There’s a reason why every hospital, Fortune 500 corporate campus, military base, supermarket, distribution centre, etc, etc all run Windows workstations. Why would a ruthlessley profit-driven corporation buy expensive Windows licenses when Ubuntu is free? Because when you’re dealing with ten thousand workstation in 150 countries, each with own requirements for data protection, working time, employee rights, etc that not only need enforcing, but need to be audited, you can do all that with a single Windows server and a half-motivated sysadmin. And for everyone smaller than that, you still get access to those same tools for your school, office, factory, whatever on your fleet of twenty mismatched laptops from eight different vendors.

Nothing else comes close, and until it does nothing will change. They would all drop Windows in an instant if there was a sensible alternative.

Is this loss?

TIL that NextCloud can use an external database.

It’s cloud all the way down.

One hundred percent go for USFF. Even the cheapest, most basic processor will smash server roles because it’s not having to power desktop applications, graphics, window managers, etc.

To be honest, I used to have an ISP with dynamic addresses and it wasn’t a huge deal. The address only changed every month or two. I used afraid.org’s dynamic DNS service to get a dynamic address that followed the changes and created CNAME records for my real domain pointing at that. The actual connection was fucking awful but the dynamic IPs never caused any problems.

As for services: Nextcloud is well worth looking into for file sync and photo backup, especially if you’ve already got a file server running.

As it happens, I’ve just finished setting up a system exactly like this for a completely off-grid setup. I needed a Raspberry Pi running Home Assistant to be completely self-contained to monitor an adjacent, larger system that is only powered up intermittently (close enough that the two systems have a common ground).

Short version: the Raspberry Pi and the Huawei LTE router I’m using for connectivity draw a steady 9W between them (there’s a lot of monitoring going on). I went with an old pair of 80W panels in very suboptimal positioning, a simple MPPT charge controller and a 110Ah deep cycle leisure battery which costs about €45, €30 and €120 respectively. The system has been running a few months now and the battery had never, ever dropped below 12.4V. The Pi uses WireGuard to connect to my VPS so Home Assistant can be accessed with a web browser since the network I’m using on-site doesn’t do public IP addresses.

Honestly in rare situations that a device like that needs to be accessible from the wild Internet I think it’d be mad to expose it directly, especially if it’s not manageable as you suggest. At the very least, I’d be leaning on a reverse proxy.

“Federation” is like “non-fungible token”. Everyone knows what it is, but they’ve never heard it called that.