There are a lot of good responses here that I won’t reiterate. I will say that, in my own personal and professional experience, Linux simply is a far better server OS than any Windows OS.
That said, use what works for you. If you are experienced and comfortable with Windows, and aren’t too keen on climbing the Linux learning curve, then by all means use Windows.
My only suggestion would be to use Windows Pro (for RDP), or find a Server Standard license for sale at less than retail.
A server rack certainly is possible, but an appropriate furniture cabinet may function for housing your lab as well. It just needs to be deep enough for your equipment and well ventilated. This can even be custom built if you have woodworking skills and tools.
I built this cabinet a few years ago. It meet with my wife's approval not because it was pretty, but it wasn't too ugly.
I use Homepage. There are plenty of other options, but I prefer Homepage because of it's speed and simplicity. Many landing page apps allow for customizing on the page itself. Homepage is configured using YAML files, and therefore static, so family members will not be able to make changes, or accidentally break it, once you have it set up.
Here is a screenshot of my... Homepage.
I use custom images and icons uploaded to Dropbox in... icons-72x72-png.zip
These are kept in volumes for persistence...
--volume homepage_config:/app/config \
--volume homepage_icons:/app/public/icons
--volume homepage_images:/app/public/images \It may be me, or Reddit could be flaking out, but it appears that everyone except you and I have deleted their comments. I also cannot reply to your comment about N8N, so I am commenting again. Weird...
I recommended Pushover in my previous comment. To address your initial question, I'm running Docker containers for Mailrise, which provides an SMTP gateway that embeds Apprise code, and also Apprise standalone. I use Mailrise for services that support only SMTP notifications (e.g. Proxmox). Mailrise translates an email message and, using Apprise code, submits it to Pushover. I use Apprise standalone for receiving notifications from Healthchecks, which monitors cron jobs. Healthchecks supports a number of notification services, but standalone Apprise was the best fit for me.
As I understand, Apprise has its own light-weight HTML API for creating and configuring notification endpoints. It can create a webhook endpoint, but I don't believe it receives messages as webhooks.
Like me, you probably will need multiple services. I tossed up an N8N container out of curiosity. It can accept a webhook and then act on it. It also supports Pushover. So, it looks like a webhook to N8N can be translated to a Pushover notification. Using Mailrise (for SMTP messages) along with N8N (for webhook and other messages) should provide the extensibility you're looking for.
Again, I highly recommend Pushover. Receiving notifications from many different sources, that are organized into "applications" with their own icons, in one mobile app is a tremendous benefit... to me anyway.
does it also report DHCP reservations?
Thanks, and yes, Type "static" are DHCP reservations.
Where do you do DHCP, on the PFSense or somewhere else?
Yes, on pfSense. I use the Python function written by pletch/scrape_pfsense_dhcp_leases.py (on Github) that scrapes the pfSense status_dhcp_leases.php page. Then added my own function for querying my TP-Link APs using SNMP to determine which AP a wireless DHCP client is connected to.
I can throw the script up on Dropbox if you are interested. I am mediocre at writing Python, so it is pretty specific to my environment.
I use Telegraf + InfluxDB + Grafana for monitoring my home network and systems. Grafana has a learning curve for building panels and dashboards, but is incredibly flexible. I use it for more than server performance. I have a dual-monitor "kiosk" (old Mac mini) in my office displaying two Grafana dashboards. These are:
Network/Power/Storage showing:
Server sensors and performance showing:
Netdata works really well for system performance for Linux and can be installed from the default repositories of major distributions.
I use Joplin every day for taking my own technical notes, often with screenshots. I use it across multiple devices and operating systems that sync through Dropbox. Notes are exported to PDF when there is a need to share them, which is infrequent.
Zotero looks keenly focused on managing research information and creating bibliographies. I am not actively involved in research, but I just downloaded and installed it on my M1 MacBook Air out of curiosity.
I opened the Zotero app, tried to create a new folder, and it immediately froze. It also looked outdated. Hope you have better luck with it.
Telegraf with Docker Input Plugin installed on the Host writing to InfluxDB and displayed in Grafana, both running in Docker containers.
Here is a screenshot of my Server Performance Grafana dashboard.