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There's not much Supermicro anymore

Supermicro make "Compact Edge System" with N97 cpus and 2x 2.5GbE. I see these selling for around $400 online but they may be using Realtek networking. The ones with 2x i226 are more like $530. Some of the GigaIPC boxes use 2x i225/i226 with N97 and are significantly cheaper.  AAEON and Jetway sell similar systems, some of which have more ports. Jetway is probably the cheapest--you can find their cheapest boxes for around $300. With all of these systems you usually need to add your own memory and drive. My experience of these type of systems is limited to a GigaIPC with 2x Intel 1GbE and a J6412 CPU. I bought it from a US reseller, although I think it shipped direct from Gigabyte USA, in November 2023 for $170. After adding memory and storage it was $250. It was cheap and it's been very reliable.

See: https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/edge/compact-edge-systems

Just pausing to mention existence of other places on the planet at which point simplicity is down the gurgler, decisions need to be made.

Yes, I started out with a Fitlet2 and then moved to a GigaIPC box. The latter company is the industrial PC division of Gigabyte. There are lots of options. There's also AAEON which is the industrial PC division of ASUS. AAEON also now owns Jetway, another IPC maker. There's also Lanner, which have at various times made boxes for certain firewall companies. They don't sell directly to consumers but you can get their stuff used, with their name or another name on the box. And, of course there's Supermicro.

I'm not sure anyone would willing leak what's described here: The Snake That Ate Itself: What Claude Code's Source Revealed About AI Engineering Culture

I'm convinced that tech CEOs and all the finance people undergo mandatory training on how to leave reality and join shareholders in an imagined dreamland of infinite growth...It must take a lot of drugs to get there.

Ed Zitron--who makes a good living mocking the AI business, its investors and media coverage:

So, yeah, anyone in the media who bought the line of shit from Dario Amodei that this was "too dangerous to release" is a mark. Cal Newport has an excellent piece debunking the hype, but my general feeling is that if Mythos was so powerful, how did Claude Code's source code leak?

The data centers are not employing people, least of all locals.  That's a lie.  They're bringing in experts to set them up and then they run autonomously more or less.

For those interested in such matters, this just dropped: A discussion of the experience with data centers and jobs in the state of Michigan.
https://www.techpolicy.press/michigan-offers-handouts-for-data-centers-promising-jobs-will-those-jobs-come/

They're recouping costs (for now) with layoffs.

True with the emphasis on "for now". It will only work up to a point if they continue to burn mountains of cash. Generative AI is fabulously expensive and unreliable tech. It's hard to see how they make a profit given that their costs are growing faster than their ability to generate revenues.

The data centers are not employing people, least of all locals.  That's a lie.  They're bringing in experts to set them up and then they run autonomously more or less.

They need a few people to go around replacing all the rapidly failing GPU parts! ;-)

When the bubble bursts we will have all the cheap enterprise grade RAM we need. "Yay".  ;)

Ha! It's taking its time to burst despite the economics of data centers stuffed with GPUs being utterly insane. They are in something like a trillion dollar hole and no one has figured out how to turn providing AI compute into a business that doesn't lose tens to hundreds of billions. At some point the Wile E. Coyote look down moment will happen.

@kbreit
Like you I'm still on ISC DHCP. When Kea appeared as an option I was going to switch but decided to wait. Now I think my switch will be to DNSmasq, as that is now what is recommended for my type of small, simple setup. Up to this point, at least, I have no regrets waiting for the various alternatives to appear and cook a little within OPNsense. As Meyergru says, "there is no rush". But at some point, maybe soon, maybe when it becomes a plug-in, it's going to make more sense to switch than stick with ISC.

Thanks. Next time this happens I will check this it out but, as you suggest, it may be worth getting a UPS.

This time it turned out to be more problematic than usual. I had the Asus sitting in for a couple of days and every few hours the WAN would disappear and then reappear after rebooting the Asus. Eventually I got round to swapping my OPNSense box back in and everything has been working as it was before.

This morning there was a one second blip in the power and every electronic device in the house went down. The cable modem and Opnsense box came back up but there's no Internet connection. I log into the OpnSense box and everything seems fine aside from the missing WAN address.  I reboot the cable modem (Arris SB2800) and then reboot the OpnSense box. No change. I swap the OpnSense box out for an Asus Router and I have an Internet connection.

This has happened several times before. The solution is always swap in the Asus box. Based on past experience, if I reconnect the OpnSense box in a couple of hours, everything will work fine. Any idea what's going ion here and how to fix it?

There was a bios update (0041) for the ASUS NUC 13 Rugged released on 1/16/2025. Link.

@aleco

Home Network Guy has a lot of useful guides. Maybe start here: https://homenetworkguy.com/how-to/install-and-configure-opnsense/

This was from 2 years ago so some parts may be a little dated (e.g. ZFS is now the default install).

@Greg_E You might find something on https://mitxpc.com/

I'd go with the 8GB of RAM model. Default install now uses ZFS and it will use the extra memory if it is available. My system is currently using about 6GB. And you want to use ZFS so you can use bectl.