So, the OTRS server is going to be a hardware box in the corner of the room at work, rather than on a virtual server online (mine or a dedicated one). The only problem is getting the drivers to work, namely, the Realtek 8111c LAN chip.
The driver, I gather, is a closed-source kernel module, and needs to be added to the Kernel to work. So, there’s an app for that, and if you sudo apt install r8168-dkmsit is supposed to add the driver for many Realtek chips to the kernel.
I built the system on a little laptop, perfectly adequate for the job, and it had a LAN chip that was either Intel or Broadcom, it doesn’t matter which, because it worked (I checked, it’s Broadcom). I unplugged the HD and stuck it in to the faster system I wanted to use going forward (after installing r8168-dkms) and it was having none of it. There’s a manual way of adding the driver to the kernel, but since the r8168-dkms package said everything installed fine, thank you, I suspect the manual install just still won’t work. And it is less desirable to manually install the kernel module when an apt package can do it for you, as it is written to re-add the module whenever a new kernel is installed.
Getting hold of a consumer class motherboard without Realtek’s chip is unusual, and all the spare second user socket 1155 and 1156 boards we’ve acquired at work have Realtek.
An Intel PCI-Express LAN board may be necessary. VIA looked promising until I realised that virtually nobody has put the VIA chip on a PCI-express board. I’ve heard that some Broadcom isn’t a bad choice either for Linux, but not all.
Intel seem a bit pricey at around double the Realtek ones, but that may be a price you have to pay for quality with proper Linux support. Still, £25 isn’t that much. Broadcom are just as pricey.
By the way, whatever happened to VIA? They were as ubiquitous 10-12 years ago as Realtek.