For that money you should be able to find a used Lenovo tiny p320 with 32GB. You can remove the GPU (was able to sell mine for 40€) and then you have a PCIe slot for further NICs or whatever you’re going to need.

All the ones you mentioned work fine. Prioritize RAM over CPU (any quadcore will be sufficient really).

One thing they easily overlooked in these is the some of them support vPro, meaning you can connect like with a KVM to them even when they’re “turned off”. It depends on their chipset.

Re 4.) Some better ISP routers have a built in VPN option. I’m using the wireguard and DynDNS that comes with my router (FritzBox).

Also there’s !minilab@lemmy.world but it’s not very active and while this community (homelab) isn’t exactly overflowing with posts I think having minilab stuff here is fine.

I’ve been mostly using this list to get an idea which brands sell stuff in my country: https://old.reddit.com/r/minilab/comments/1g1nto6/offtheshelf_10_gear_guide/

And the search function on printables.com for device specific rackmounts

Here’s the result: https://lemmy.nocturnal.garden/post/74822

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