SgtSuckaFree

If the motherboard has any available pcie slots (and the chassis has space for it), minimal graphics cards with HDMI or VGA or whatever else can be had for really cheap. That’s what I use to troubleshoot my truenas box.

I second this, Valetudo is rock solid. Also the map it creates in HA is more or less live.

Glad to see I’m not the only one doing this. It definitely leads to a lot of small talk about my email domain, but I’ve never run into a situation yet where I couldn’t sign up for something. My personal favorite is when reluctantly providing an email for something I don’t care about I can spout out something like “blockthishottrash@mydomain.tld”. That’s lead to some fun reactions.

I run Home Assistant in Kubernetes. I also use helm, which significantly reduces the amount of config yaml that’s necessary for k8s, so it’s pretty manageable.