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If you're looking for something that's relatively cheap ( ~ $150 on ebay), upgradable, can handle 1GbE (it has a 3.1GHz CPU) and low power (idles at 10 watts), then check out the HP 290. There's a big thread below on the many use cases. Unfortunately it's not rack mountable but it is a small form factor. It has one 80mm fan but very quiet.

https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/official-hp-290-p0043w-owners-thread/2829

This is outstanding.  Thanks for this.  It is not rack mountable, but it is starting to tick a lot of the 'Holy Grail' boxes!

Welcome to the club.  :D

There are plenty of threads in these forums on fanless but powerful hardware for OPNsense in these forums. If you're looking for new hardware why don't you do a search for "qotom" and that should give you a starting point for a suitable replacement for your current setup. Unfortunately I can't help too much with hardware as my setup is a VM in a vSphere environment.

Thanks for the welcome! I have looked at qotom, but was open to a home brew build particularly if I can wrap it in a rack mount. I enjoy putting it together, particularly if I can get it done for very little through scrounging and scavenging for parts.  It may not be possible in this case because I did it last time, but it was big, noisy and took more power than necessary. Hence, the 'Holy Grail' to achieve my ideal list for not much money.

Ugh. I will back away slowly now

Sorry for the double post. My iPad isn't playing nicely.

As I move into a new home and set up my modest home lab and office, I am moving from the PFSense train.

My PFsense box was built from scrounging parts and was in a tower. It worked great, but was noisy, big and consumed more power than necessary.

So I'd like to be a bit more refined this go round. Maybe this is a bit of a holy grail. My ideal is:

- inexpensive, I don't mind scrounging parts again and building my next box on a budget.

- reasonably future proof, handling up to 1 Gbps. Currently on 100 Mbps fiber for five users with laptops, devices, lots, etc.

- run a moderate number of services, IPS, DPS, Adguard, an occasional VPN

- quiet, ideally fanless, but may need to scrounge some quiet fans

- as energy efficient as possible

- ideally rack mountable, so to avoid another small piece of kit kicking around. (I have spare rack space)

Any ideas on a good used foundation to build this on, or with new parts, etc?

TIA