Now that I have time for hobbies again I wanna dive right in to building up a home lab. Right now I just have a Netgear router that reached end of life, and a NAS i’d like to make accessible remotely, and a DIY router seems like the correct next step for me. I’m very interested in ad-blocking network wide and someday I’d like to host my own little webpage, but for now I’m really just barely getting started.
I’m information gathering, I don’t know what I don’t know and my networking skills are pretty weak anyway. But even if your needs and desires have nothing to do with mine, I also just like to hear people talk about their set ups. Please? 🌞
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You can get fanless mini PCs bare from aliexpress for cheap then buy laptop ram and ssd seperetly (chepeast you can find)
Thank you!
Currently running OPNsense on a small Dual-Nic Shuttle PC with an Pentium G4560 and 4 gigs of ram and it’s been handling everything I throw at it perfectly fine. Ive got 16 Interfaces, around 10 Wireguard Peers and a SIT tunnel to HE and Im still getting Line Speeds through the firewall.
I might be able to snag that same model with an i5-6500 for around 60€. Could you tell me more about your experience with it? In particular, how are the thermals and the power consumption, can it handle 1Gb/s on both ethernet ports, and have you encountered any compatibility issues with OPNsense?
Thermals are pretty much ok as long as you dont have the cpu at 100% 24/7. I’ve never had it go over ~50°C in normal use in my basement. Not sure if it can handle gbit on 2 ports but Iperf between two vlans on the same NIC works flawlessly with lots of cpu to spare
Mine sits at around ~11W during normal usage (~40mbps into a wireguard tunnel)
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DHCP Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, automates assignment of IPs when connecting to a network DNS Domain Name Service/System ISP Internet Service Provider IoT Internet of Things for device controllers LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage NAT Network Address Translation NVMe Non-Volatile Memory Express interface for mass storage NVR Network Video Recorder (generally for CCTV) PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) PoE Power over Ethernet SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network
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OPNsense on used dell optiplex. Very easy but it can do whatever you want to grow into as you learn more.
Is the power consumption too bad, if you know?
