All my homelab stuff is boring. Host machine names are just 'model ’ + ‘-’ + ‘increment’. VMs and containers are either service or service + increment.

Whimsical names and themes are fun, but don’t scale and I need the mental bandwidth for other things than mapping service to machine etc.

I still love my rpi’s, was on the wait list for the first run when they came out! But the chip shortage and subsequent scalping drove me away to buying recycled lenovo tiny PCs.

Dirt cheap on eBay, like $60 without storage. Got three of them clustered for VM and LXC hosting loaded up w/ 32gb ram, 1tb data ssd, and 500gb nvme each. About the price for a top model pi4 these days after all the accessories and they absolutely smoke the pi’s. Even have pcie on some models if you want to add a network card to build a router, or a small graphics card etc.

Yes, unconsciously, we are all subject to the influence of advertising and manipulation of information even if we think we are consciously aware of it and try to avoid it. Others around us are, and they influence us, culture dictates norms and communicates through overt and symbolic language. It impacts our decision making processes. Advertisers know this and have leveraged this since the creation of that field.

Here’s a fun piece by Adam Curtis about the origin of PR, advertising, and its roots in psychology at the turn of the 20th Century: The Century of the Self . I think folks here will enjoy it considering why we left Reddit :)

You could also get a set of rails from navepoint and custom build for a bit cheaper. Or IKEA lack rack diy.

But I agree, all this stuff is too large for my taste and current gear too. I’m eyeing 10in 9U for my minilab, which is now comfortably tucked away hiding in some furniture in my living room.