Out of curiosity why would you call Ceph a fake HCI? As far as I’ve seen, it behaves akin to any of the other HCI systems I’ve used.

Not all of them. Ceph on Proxmox and (iirc) VMware vSAN run bare metal. That statement was a call-out post for Nutanix, which runs their storage inside a VM cluster. Both of these have been doing so for years.

The Netgear M4300 I got works like that, it’s a feature not a bug. There’s no link lights on the bottom, so the top row does the ports in alternate left/right patterns matching the label on the case right above the light.

Edit: a word

Any system without network unlock usually requires a TPM PIN/PW every reboot. Your instructions (when read a certain way) imply that the command also bypasses the encryption without fetching a recovery key from the TPM or DC.

My home network (ISC DHCPD) behaves this way - either I type the TPM key or I type the 25-char key.

You use console to turn on embedded shell then Ctrl+Alt+Fn over to it (I forget whether it’s on f1 or f2), then you can use esxcli and all the rest of that to fix it up.

Once you get enough networking/storage pieces sorted out you can get back into the management HTML UI and SSH

Then when you’re done fixing, turn shell and SSH back off.