Minimal x86 box for 1Gbps WAN

[sunmast]

I've been using DELL Inspiron 3472 (Pentium Silver J5005 CPU) + Intel I340T2 to run my home firewall + router for a while. It works great so far (VPN, IDS, etc.). I think it's an overkill for my home network though (Comcast 300Mbps plan).

Today I tired to run it on Wyse 3040 (Atom x5-Z8350 CPU) + Realtek USB 3.0 LAN adapter instead. Surprisingly it works great too. NATing speed is 100% LAN speed (1Gbps). I didn't test VPN performance but the CPU supports AES-NI so it should work well too. Only problem is some settings in /boot/device.hints need to be changed otherwise the OS won't boot (FreeBSD bug).

[sunmast]

The Wyse 3040 didn't pass stress test (after running iperf for a few hours the USB NIC is down till a reboot) :-[

[drew442]

Pretty sure my 3040 has the nic attached via pcie. the z8300 machines i have use the via USB, i through this besides a small difference in boost clock was the difference between them?

Or is the usb for a second nic? You can just use vlan interfaces instead...

[random1104]

Pretty sure my 3040 has the nic attached via pcie. the z8300 machines i have use the via USB, i through this besides a small difference in boost clock was the difference between them?

Or is the usb for a second nic? You can just use vlan interfaces instead...

Interested in this too. Would be a nice branch office gateway paired with a switch.

[sunmast]

Pretty sure my 3040 has the nic attached via pcie. the z8300 machines i have use the via USB, i through this besides a small difference in boost clock was the difference between them?

Or is the usb for a second nic? You can just use vlan interfaces instead...

The USB NIC is the second NIC. Yeah VLAN should work too. But now I have a 2Gbps plan... didn't try the VLAN setup.

[Greg_E]

If you can clamp a piece of metal to the USB NIC, you might get better performance, overheating is the issue. That said, getting one to be stable is pretty much an impossible task. Some people claim USB NIC work fine, other claim very short times between drops or lockups. I'm in the second camp. If the throughput is small, then you might be OK.

Here is where people will start offering all sorts of other thin client devices, yes there are several like the Lenovo m90q series, my current personal favorite is the HP T740 which takes a low profile card (i350, i226, etc) without slot adapters or special back plate supports and can be up to 4 ports. There are also many mini-pc on the market that would handle gigabit, Intel n5105, n100, n95, even a j4125 would probably work and many different chassis that offer up to 8 ports.

HP T620+ might be on the low end of processor spec (still a PCIe slot), there might be a model between T620+ and T740 that has a slot, but I'm not certain.

And one final addition, you can remove the a+e wifi card and install an a+e Intel i226 NIC adapter to get an extra port, I have 3 T740 in my lab with these adapters fitted, not a huge amount of work to do this (running vSphere8). This might help with your Wyse box.