well, things were trickling in. moved the nicely packaged server into my office for some unboxing and staring at it, scrutinizing it and cracking it open. everything was intact. i sorted out the cables, tried to figure out how i was gunna test things and went to the desktop system to download the proxmox ve 8.4 ios and make a bootable drive. of course i needed an antiquated vga monitor adapter, keyboard and mouse to even look at the boot. fast forward to finding a way to do all that i booted it up and my adapter didnt seem to be working (vga to hdmi) on a whim i hit the ebay again and found and old server console /keyboard assembly that would work, made a rediculously cheap offer and waited some more. at this point i powered everything on, just to listen to the boot up process, heard the server fans scream, then settle down, at least on the auditory side everything seemed to be working alright. i got some patch cables and an old unmanaged switch and got the idrac port and a 1gb port tied into my network. started doing some more digging on the interwebs – hey those video cards need more power than the pci riser can provide! needed special cables, ordered those and some thermal paste for the new (to me) xeon processors and did more waiting and interneting. its been a month now and i haven’t even see the boot up screen