With the price of ssds what they are now for a small 100gb why bother with the additional setup and potentially failure points.

I’ve run esxi through network and even that wasn’t fun with longish boot times. I certainly wouldn’t like to run proxmox that way. These days there’s really no reason not to have “some” fast direct storage in each server even if it’s just used mainly as cache.

What you’re looking for is possible but to me the saving of $20 ish per machine just isn’t worth introducing more headaches.

Some more details may help here.

What printer is it and what’s it reaching out for?

As said, setting up static ip and removing the gateway will usually be enough. Vlans are the better option but steeper learning. I’d be interested to find out what it’s doing though. Knowing what you’re working with may help others advise you more specifically.

If it’s checking to find time or for updates then it’s probably harmless. Do you need internet to enable any features like remote send or monitoring and the like?

Depends on the error as to how it will affect you.

The 2 most serious ones I’ve seen are:

Self test error or communication error

Both will cause long post times. Once up and running if you don’t use Ilo you won’t see any difference.

There’s a less serious nand issue that won’t slow down post. All of Ilo will function pretty much but you lose intelligent provisioning functions and some other small things. You get a warning in Ilo. This can sometimes be fixed with Ilo update and nand reset but doesn’t usually work.

From my personal point of view, ilo is one of the big reasons to use these servers. If you don’t need / use out of band management then there’s likely better options. I would avoid any with Ilo issues.

With that said, if you get a good deal on a server then the system boards are becoming more common in a lot of cases so swapping that out might not be problem.

Surely you should have the answers before exposing sensitive devices to the outside world?

Not trying to be mean but if you don’t understand what’s happening and why then how can you guard against it?

Everybody gets probed, that is normal. Make it difficult by taking basic precautions and they will move on to easier targets. There’s so many people that don’t do anything and leave themselves wide open. This is what they’re looking for in most cases. Exceptions do include people you might have upset and specifically want access to yours.

Do some homework, secure / segregate your stuff and move on :)