I moved away from pihole because every time I had a fiddle, I bought down the DNS of my whole house, resulting in lots of stressed children :) the solution I switched to is against the ethos of this sub, but it's good and worth the cost.

I would risk it. After all, it's the only thing protecting my entire gitlab account. If someone could break my ssh, they could do what they want to my gitlab presence,and I'm guessing someone at gitlab is paid and qualified to make that call.

Have dropped from 500w (2 x R710) to 50-60w (5600X, 32Gb, 2 nvme drives, 3 sata SSDs, Coursir Platinum PSU, Gigabyte Mobo

Plus in the lab, I have a ONT and a small network switch (replacing a managed one saved 20w or so), and a work laptop, which brings the at the wall consumption of the entire lab to around 80-90w

Id be interested to see how folk with the Athlon processors are getting so much less power usage than me

Thank you, but in all honesty, this white box job boots so fast I no longer have to babysit the boot process, and on the rare occasion I need to mess with it at firmware level, ill just walk out to the garage :) given how far ive come, another 10w or so running a KVM would reduce my power saving from the pleasing 90% ive achived :)

I have been on a similar quest. I've gone from 500w to 50w over the last few years, starting with 2 r710s pimped out to the max, to a flash only white box athlon build. Slightly miss idrac, but a decent trade for it being 50w and so quiet I can only tell it's on by the LEDs.