If you're willing to deal with terminal, you don't need a gpu at all. You can merely connect over serial (which could be a DB8 connector, or an ethernet connector, or whatever), and a directly plugged in screen/keyboard (which is usually also supported, though maybe not over HDMI or anything) will also work.
And to be honest, if you want to play with servers, you should get used to terminal- it will do you a lot of good in general.
I mean yeah probably, but you better hope to God that the motherboard has DHCP enabled by default. I don't know why it wouldn't, but I've seen some stupid configs in my life.
Why it should need dhcp? You can configure bmc's IP from the bios or from the system running ipmitool. I never use dhcp for the ipmi's ip, it is better to use a static one since it is better to keep always the same one.
Never ran across a server motherboard that needed an extra PCIe card to plug a video display regardless of the CPU used.
This BMC advertise the remote display feature you seek.
ATi Rage 128 gang.
Yes,I manage some servers with this config and it should work very well.
The only problem is that some old ipmis (and some new) use Java web start (.jnlp files) for the remote control feature and that is being phase out, so in some cases I have to use a vm with an old Java version to connect. Modern ipmis have also html5 kvm which is much more useful.
I'm looking at you IBM/Lenovo
And supermicro, gigabyte...
Supermicro new licensing scheme for new platforms requires a special license to mount media on the html5 kvm, so you must use the annoying Java version if you need that or don't want to pay a 200$ extra feature unlock.
Also in that case I only was able to run it with the supermicro utility for Linux, which includes its own Java distro.
If the motherboard has a built in 2d video card you'll be fine, otherwise you can try via serial which will be slow. Ipmi can sometimes do video or it's serial over Lan.
Serial bit will be slow and might not be default so the first bit night be really tricky. Also some systems won't post with a video card, especially in the consumer world.
I'd personally boot with a GPU then swap it out once the system is correctly configured for ssh access.
Install the boot drive in a different machine and then pass it though to a VM. Once in the VM install truenas to the disk.
After that's completed you are good to go. Just boot up the physical machine and point your browser to Truenas.local
It doesn't break anything doing this? Especially networking settings?
It shouldn't