I was thinking the same thing. Spanning tree is love. Spanning tree is life…when deployed correctly.

Alternatively I’m thinking noise, as I’ve seen that in 10gig connections a few times, which is why I prefer LC fiber where possible.

Unless they’re willing to give you your own IP (dynamic, or maybe static for a fee), that’s a good reason for replacing your ISP imo.

Nah, I work for a geophysical company with a bunch of storage clusters and data crunchers around the world.

Depends on which aspect of you needs to be ready. Use case and functionality? Meh, now is as good time as any. Might as well get used to the differences from a desktop to servers early on. Especially if you still don’t really have the knowledge. Learn by doing!

Budget? True, they can be pricey, even on the after market. But if you or a friend works anywhere that had servers, chances are that the IT department might have something that’d otherwise end up in the trash. A good example here is this VM server with rather old CPUs and 256G of RAM. It wasn’t fit for its pyrpose anymore, and its hardware configuration made it a bad match for our storage clusters. Today it’s a minecraft server for my kids and their friends.

EDIT: Actually, the older PowerEdge servers feom Dell aren’t that pricey on my local marketplace.

Servers: Supermicro. Dell in a pinch
Switches: HPE Aruba for 10gig, or Mellanox for 100gig
Routers: I’m not that picky, but I use Fortigate as I scavenged some leftovers at work
UPS: Eaton
Network cards: Intel for 10gig, IBM for 8 or 16gig, Mellanox for 100gig
Harddrives: Exos
RAID stuff: LSI MegaRaid.
GPU: Don’t really care, but I have a bunch of NVidia Quadro.

Most of the above preferences are due to scavenging leftover hardware at work.