The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw. I had 2 Dell blade server chassis and 1 HP blade server chassis that used Xeon based blades. The electric bill was UNREAL with 10+ blades running at once.
I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.
Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after switching to tiny x64 machines w/ real SSDs in them.
I picked up a HP managed switch that I thought I might use but it draws more power than the ThinkCentre M93p Tiny computers do and it's actively cooled w/ super noisy 1U fan(s) so I'm going to ditch it.
Yeah - I skipped rPi because back when I started replacing stuff ARM still had some gotcha's with stuff that hadn't been ported. I do use the rPi's for the 3d printers though.
I've found the TP Link stuff to be good for home switches. cheap, quiet, and basically fully featured/managed. Stuff like SNMP, VLAN/Mac Lan, port mirroring/monitoring, etc. Also SSH and web interfaces... I have 2-3 currently, 1 per room feeding back to the PowerConnects (NOISY) and haven't had a single issue in 3-5 years of use :-)
One of the coolest additions to my home lab recently was an Orange Pi 5 plus/pro - 8 core ARM 64-bit cpu and 32GB of RAM all with awesome power usage and zero noise, plus an up to date kernel. I skipped the rpi as well a while back but these newer boards are worth lookin at! :)
The Omada line makes pretty decent AP’s too. A step above ubiquiti in terms of reliability but also dead simple. I’d have gone ruckus if I could have but the mailman stole my $200 eBay R550 score and I didn’t feel like shelling out $500 for one.
I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.
I was also looking for a successor to the PC Engines APUs and came across https://teklager.se/en/ that lists some possible alternatives that you might find interesting.
Personally I was looking to build a router so I ended up buying a fanless N100 based mini PC from Aliexpress (e.g.: search term is "N100 firewall appliance") and have been very satisfied with it so far (Proxmox homelab with OPNsense running as a VM).
> The down side to the old enterprise servers is the power draw.
It depends on the generation of the gear. Stuff coming off-lease in the last 3 - 4 years has been of a generation where lower power draw became a major selling point. In Dell land, for example, the power draw differences are dramatic between the Rx10, Rx20, and newer series. (Basically, throw Rx10 servers in the trash. Rx20 servers are better but still not great.)
I do use Dell PowerConnect manged switches from EBay, but tbh for what I do, TP Link switches work really well and are cheap. They support VLANs, MAC Lans, SNMP, SSH/Web configuration, etc etc - basically fully managed switches. And they have been rock solid as 'edge' switches for each room in the house. The powerconnects basically work as top-of-rack switches for pulling all the different rooms/rack into 1 feed to the cable modem.