u/Reave1905

My wife and I love huge dogs. We have 2 medium-large breed dogs (Staffy/Mastiff mix, 8 & a Golden Retriever, 4) along with a giant breed (English Mastiff, 1) already, and we are looking into breeds for a 4th dog in the next couple of years when the Mastiff is a little older.

What are some of best resources around for learning about the Irish Wolfhound and if that breed would suit our lifestyle? Main things I'd like to know about are below.

- How are they with other dogs?

- Do they enjoy playing rough? (I like to wrestle and roll around with my dogs)

- Do they enjoy just being lazy and cuddling? (My wife likes to cuddle with our dogs on the sofa)

- What sort of energy levels do they have? With a Wolfhound being a 4th dog we need to be conscious of how much time we have for walks

- grooming requirements. They don't look like a long haired breed like a Golden Retriever, but they also don't look like a short haired breed, so interested in how this is.

- what common health issues to query breeders about. We had to be aware of the risks of cystinuria and other health issues when we were searching for our Mastiff, so want to make sure we have all our boxes ticked.

Thank you.

I'm at a point where my ad-hoc homelab is becoming a bit unruly, and I have a rats nest of cables strewn about everywhere from two 12-port switches. I've been able to purchase a 42u rack from a closed down business for cheaper than I could find a 12 or 25u rack and since I have all of this space now, I want to start filling it and teaching myself as much as I can, so I want hardwire my house with network ports, get a proper managed switch, patch panel, firewall etc.

Where is the best place to buy hardware from? I'm not opposed to buying used items from eBay or Marketplace, but just looking for the best deals I can find where possible. It's not something I plan to complete in a weekend, or even over a single month, so I'm not in a rush. If there are specific times of year where it's best to look out for deals i'd appreciate all the advice I can get.

As for ecosystems, I'm probably most tempted by Unifi as that's what I'm familiar with from work, but I'm not opposed to alternatives.

I'm relatively new to reading, and have only been reading for just over a year, but I've managed finish 39 books so far. Most of them have been what I would considerto be pretty heavy books, with moral grey areas, hard hitting emotional themes, big shocking twists or general dark tones. (Books like Red Rising, Stormlight Archive, Will of the Many etc)

I thought I'd try something new for a chance of pace and picked up The Legend of UH by Aaron N. Hall, and absolutely fell in love with it. It was such a change on what I've been used to, and it felts like it's just a fun adventure between a couple of buds. I immediately started The Second Legend of UH, but I definitely want more of this in-between some of the more emotionally demanding books.

What else can I read as a fun little palate cleanser?

I have no idea if either of you will read this, but thank you Matt and Jeff. You have turned a pretty shit time for me into something great, so I wanted to extend my appreciation. I had surgery on my foot a few days ago, and was feeling pretty miserable about being stuck in bed the whole time. Luckily, I had put off reading book 8 until after my surgery was complete.

I wasn't sure how you would top the end of Faction Wars, but you smashed it out of the park again. I'm a 36 year old man and >!chapter 57 !<had me giggling like a schoolgirl, and I literally gasped out loud when >!Carl summoned Scolopendra as his quest reward!<

Now I'm off to go and read Operation Bounce House and then get started on the Audio Immersion Tunnel. Thanks again.

TLDR at the bottom.

I have only been creating my homelab over the last 6 months or so. I've made a lot of mistakes but I've also learned a lot more. I started off with a few Windows VMs on Hyper-V, but had issues with transcodes and couldn't get GPU passthrough working so I swapped over to Proxmox. Eventually I got rid of one of my windows VMs in favour of a Linux VM dedicated to Docker, and then I discovered Unraid while researching building a NAS as I had a few free drive bays in my PC and a few gifted hard drives.

I know it isn't officially supported, but I set up Unraid on a VM because I couldn't afford to get rid of all my containers immediately and build everything from scratch. i've set it up exactly how I want it, and all of my VMs are now offline so I am looking into retiring Proxmox entirely on this PC and running Unraid on bare metal instead, but I had a question before I pull the trigger.

Since the VM I created for Unraid doesn't actually have a virtual hard drive allocated to it, and the internal hard drives are all passed through the hypervisor to the Unraid VM as SATA devices, would everything work okay if I just rebooted the PC and changed the boot order to boot from USB instead of the internal NVME? I know that the hardware would be detected differently, and I don't want to get myself blacklisted by doing this all the wrong way.

If any of you have any experience moving straight from a VM to a bare metal config on the same hardware and are willing to give your advice and experience I'd really appreciate it.

TLDR: want to switch off Proxmox and all my VMs to move to Unraid on bare metal. My Unraid is currently set up on a VM on the same device I want to use as the bare metal device. Anything I need to do in advance to make sure it goes smoothly?