One downside to using older 1L tiny-mini-micro nodes though is that I have to use USB3 to 2.5gig adapters.
I have a HP Elitedesk mini 800 G9, and I was able to get a Marvel 10gbe NIC for it, that goes into the option port in the back of the box.
I am not sure what kind of tiny mini micro nodes you are using. I know HP also makes a 2.5gbe NIC for that option port.
@louie1961 that is great insights. 10 GbE connectivity is often a downside to these mini machines, but great to know there is an option for that here.
@louie1961 Most of mine are Dell Optiplex 7060, one 7070 and the sandbox cluster is all 7050s.
I believe Dell did make a 10Gig adapter card but I have been hard-pressed to source any of the proprietary add-on modules for these micro PCs sold separately. I've seen a few mentions of adapters on "3rd page search results" that rise to nearly 3 times the cost I paid for the micro PC itself. I wish they were more readily available but it seems Dell only offers them during a new purchases.
I have two HP EliteDesk G3 nodes but they've not been too stable in the cluster so far. Onboard NIC was unusable with a v5.15 kernel, lasted about 10 minutes with a v6.2 kernel and doesn't register at all in the later v6.5 kernel in ProxMox 8.1x. I have a pair of USB NICs on them now but that isn't ideal. I'm probably going to retire those two PCs and use them for other projects as they seem perfectly fine running Windows 10/11.
@t3hbeowulf Great insights there. I have seen the same unfortunately....10 gig cards and adapters are ridiculously expensive on the third-party market. Hopefully this will change in the future.