Comment on good alternatives to raspberry pi which are cheap and efficient?
dan@upvote.au 8 months agomy router is a Lenovo m920q tiny with an eBay dual SFP+ 10G NIC running pfSense 2.7.
Can you get 10Gbps NAT throughput through it? That’s the main reason I’m not running my own pfSense/opnSense router.
I’ve currently got a TP-Link ER8411 which was affordable ($350) and can reach 10Gbps, but it doesn’t have an IPv6 firewall (what???) so I can’t actually enable IPv6.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
So the big gain you’ll likely see is bang/capability for the money. If you’re careful and wait for a deal, can usually find 1L boxes for like $50-75. Get a cheap m2 ssd (and back up your confs regularly if you’re not running raid z2). The nic is going to be anywhere from about 30-70, but you’ll need to do your research on exactly what capabilities the thing you’re buying has (for example: I had a false start initially, because the RJ45 10G nic I found couldn’t negotiate at 2.5G (what I’m running now), and it’s actually pretty hard to find a 2.5G enterprise nic. Make sure the nic is intel, too - none of that Realtek crap, which is less performant and often has stupid driver crap you have to deal with under Linux and BSD (pfSense). You may want to spend a few extra bucks and get the Lenovo external pcie mount plate/bracket for aesthetics/“don’t stick your fingies in here”, and you will need an adapter for Lenovo’s proprietary PCIe-but-not-a-standard-PCIe-port thing.
dan@upvote.au 8 months ago
I’ve actually got a spare HP ProDesk SFF PC with an Intel Core i5-9500. Would that CPU be sufficient?
I’ve also got a spare 10Gbps Trendnet NIC which uses an Aquantia AQC107 chip. Are Aquantia OK for this purpose?
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yeah, though the advantage of the T sku CPUs is that they have ultra low tdp. Great for 24/7 boxes.
dan@upvote.au 8 months ago
The T version is usually the same price as the non-T version, and on a good motherboard you can modify the power limits in the BIOS to make a non-T CPU perform similarly to the T version.