Messages

1

Hardware and Performance / Re: The Holy Grail of Home Lab and Office Hardware

« on: March 23, 2021, 03:16:08 pm »

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!

2

Hardware and Performance / Re: The holy Grail of Home Labb and Office Hardware

« on: March 23, 2021, 01:52:34 pm »

Welcome to the club. 

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.

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Hardware and Performance / Re: The Holy Grail of Home Lab and Office Hardware

« on: March 23, 2021, 01:40:42 pm »

Ugh. I will back away slowly now

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Hardware and Performance / Re: The Holy Grail of Home Lab and Office Hardware

« on: March 23, 2021, 01:38:21 pm »

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

5

Hardware and Performance / The Holy Grail of Home Lab and Office Hardware

« on: March 23, 2021, 11:50:43 am »

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