Turnkey mini-PC for home-routing duties.

After a home rewire, I’m ready to bump up to 2.5GbE, and demote my old 1Gbps router/wifi box to “AP Only mode”.

I want at least five six total ports, four of which need to be 2.5+ (three to different rooms, one for uplink, one 1G+ for the AP, and one “any speed is enough” for the networked printer :) )

It seems like the “mini-PC with a bunch of 2.5GbE ports running OPNSense” option fits neatly between “Build a router out of my old i5-2500K and some eBay NICs and ignore the USD450 electric bill”, and “enterprise rackmount gear with Delta fans left over from people overclocking their Socket A Athlons.”

I see a lot of machines of the form “fanless case with a little castle of fins on top, Intel N100 CPU, six 2.5G ports from I226 chipset”. A representative example is www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806214512701.html

I suspect they may all be re-brands of the same basic product, but I wanted to know real-world experiences:

Basic question: can anyone vouch for any specific one of these devices/sellers and confirm it worked for them?
I understand the i225-v LAN chipset was much buggier than the i226-v and to be avoided; still the case? I see a few products that are like USD50 cheaper, with different CPUs and i225-based LAN.
For routing/firewall duties (probably 4 PCs, 3 phones, a couple printers, and some smart devices) , are the bottom-of-the-line configs (8GB RAM/128G disc) suitable? Is the CPU sufficient? The N100 makes me laugh-- Intel doesn’t even want to give it a brand name.
Regarding WiFi, should I just block out that little Mini-PCIe slot on the board from my mind? I know that FreeBSD WiFi has been sort of a fourth-class citizen for years, but I was wondering if there had been a breakthrough, or at least a “here is one specific card you can buy for a largely drama-free experience”
Weird question: Any problems with RF noise? I have had some devices where the power brick made a mess of a neighbour’s AM radio reception, and I don’t want to start a war with him. I figure when you’re buying a device with a 60w wall-wart from a random brand, it might not be the cleanest.

cmnybo, 3 months ago

If you bridge multiple ethernet ports, the performance will be worse than using a switch. Unless you want 5 separate networks, then you only need 2 ports and an ethernet switch.

8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD is more than enough for running OPNsense. You could easily get by with half that.

Don’t bother with the WiFi card unless you want to use it to connect to the hotspot on your phone as a backup internet connection. They are not intended for use as an access point.

As far as RFI, cheap power bricks are noisy. You may have to get some FT240-31 torroids and loop many turns of the cords through them. 100mbps ethernet is also noisy, avoid it if at all possible. If you absolutely have to use it, use shielded cable. 10mbps is fairly quiet and so is 1gbps and higher.

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HakFoo, 3 months ago

Ah. I was drawn to the tidiness of the single box with six ports, and didn’t realise the topology differed from the home router/AP/switch/waffle iron boxes.

A two-port router plus an 8-port 2.5G switch are probably cheaper too.

I wish someone would make small components designed to stack, like the old Linksys kit contemporary with the WRT54G. All this ends up crammed precariously on a bedroom deesser because that was where the local cable decided to mount their connection for the modem, hence the desire to keep the box count down. Maybe when we get fibre (eyeroll) we can convince them to mount the gear in another room more amenable to a little equipment cabinet/rack.

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