To start - moving services from bare metal to rootless Podman containers running via quadlets. It’s something I have had in mind for a while but keep second guessing the distro choice. Long-ish release cadence, systemd-networkd and a recent Podman version in the native repos, well supported, and not Ubuntu.
So far openSUSE Leap seems like the winner. A testing machine is up to install everything, write some deployment scripts, and decide on a storage layout and partitioning scheme.
If anyone has another distro to recommend that checks these boxes let me know!
I like rolling release for the desktop, but only want critical patches in any given month for this server, and a major upgrade no more than every 3-4 years. Or an immutable server distro. But it doesn’t seem like networkd is an option for the ones I’ve looked at (Fedora CoreOS, openSUSE MicroOS), and I am not sure if I want to figure out Ignition/Combustion right now.
Next project - VLANs on Mikrotik.
OP - Navepoint makes good racks for reasonable money. I have a Pro series 9u from them and it went together without any problems. It’s on the wall with a pretty big ups in it.
Noise happens. Could be no problem, or it could hurt your wifi or mobile data connections, or maybe raise a neighbor’s ham radio noise floor. I saw this recently when setting up a pi to run BirdNet-Pi. The USB3 connection to an SSD caused enough noise in the 2.4GHz band that the onboard wifi radio could only connect on the 5GHz band.