If you only have 2 and 1 fails, you’ll need to make sure the remaining one can take on 100% of the workload. If you’ve already maxed one and want HA, I’d suggest adding 2 more. Otherwise you’ll need to decide what services are down while you repair

Everything is super expensive these days which is why I’ve got all kinds of nodes. I lurk marketplace, kijiji, etc for “broken” or “for parts” nodes. Laptops with broken keyboards, screens, no battery, etc are perfect for me. I7 11th gen was $90 CAD. Works perfectly for a node. Found a cheap tiny with a locked bios. Removed the CMOS battery to reset and I’m good to go.

If you’re not willing to do that, the working tinys are perfect in my opinion.

The working Synology seems extra to me. You could use software like ceph, or diy it. Storage boxes don’t need crazy specs, just sata ports and power. The only reason I’d consider it is if you just want something “simple that works” and you’re willing to pay for it.

I don’t know about proxmox but I have 6 Pi4 8GB, 5 lenovo Tiny (i5-4x and i7-8x), and 3 laptops in a k8s cluster and love it. I actually have too many hosts but it’s a lot of fun for me to play on them. Storage is longhorn for anything with a database, everything else is over NFS onto a box I built myself. If you use the *arrs try them over the network and watch the logs. They HATE network storage and will complain a lot. If you don’t have any issues there you should be good.

I haven’t had any issues and just use the 1gb network. As for form factor, I think it’s whatever you have room for. The laptops are annoying but they have the best hardware so I put up with it.

I did this in college (2011) once… Friday class was going over stuff I already understood and got bored, found a cable and played with it for a few min before plugging in both ends to the wall. Monday morning get to class and it’s cancelled because the network is down. I then understood what I did and unplugged the cable.

Haven’t told anyone until today.

If you’re near Canada you can use CIRA. https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/configure/home-router/

For IPv4, enter: 149.112.121.10 and 149.112.122.10

For IPv6, enter: 2620:10A:80BB::10 and 2620:10A:80BC::10

Just don’t piscine the pool.

Edit: how can I forget good ol’ toilet water! Eau de toilette

If voices did it right, all Reddit will have is a fake email and an IP that isn’t theirs. The IP would be a VPN or a compromised/hacked server. Behind that should be another VPN/hacked server, maybe then over tor, etc, etc, etc.