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.
