Re: Hardware Advice Wanted: Router
On 14/11/23 08:42, Dan Ritter wrote:
I bought one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-HUNSN-Barebone-Storage/dp/B0B53MKZBX/
(4 x 2.5Gb NICs, N5105 CPU) -- I paid about $250 including 16GB RAM
and a 500GB SSD. Works very nicely. For about $70 less you can get
them with 2x 2.5Gb instead of 4; for a little more money you can get
up to 5x 2.5Gb NICs. You can add wifi via a miniPCIe slot; I didn't
bother. There are
The reality is that for a basic router function you don't need very much
hardware and certainly don't need fans. All the commercial Chinese
routers demonstrate that.
I've seen various comments on this thread advocating for NUC devices
with and without fans. In my view they are way overkill.
I have progressed over a couple of decades with different fanless router
technology starting with PCengines (current product is the APU2
https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm )
Since then I have used a variety of Chinese ARM based SBC computers with
RAM as low as 512K. I changed them as networking speed increased and the
current generations are now capable of running multiple 2.5G LAN
interfaces and usually have USB3 interfaces and often HDMI
Some of them also provide inbuilt PCIe M.2 drive slots that run at very
impressive transfer speeds.
My current favourites are RK3588 based CPU SBC devices which have an
exceptionally fast set of CPUs, high speed networking, and options for
Debian or Ubuntu or OpenWRT or Armbian. They can provide a network
storage service as well as a highly capable firewall Ipv4/IPv6
function,with DNS, DHCP, mail gateway, VPN gateway etc.
These things cost under $100USD including a nice heatsink case and
8-16GB RAM.
Incidentally I live in Australia and don't have airconditioning and it
gets up to 35C inside some days. The units I use have never gone into
thermal shutdown.
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