Good ITX board with limited availability

[ruffy91]

I need IPMI, my home IS a datacenter. Why wouldn't I just use my providers firewall if it wasn't? :-)

[qinohe]

Of course you need that, but are you the OP?   

[rungekutta]

Hi, I guess we're talking about a router used in the home domain. Depending on your needs anything would do. Here a supermicro d-410 with a HP-364T quad gigabit adapter, such you can probably buy on your well known marketplace for a few dollar. It runs IDS, a proxy for 'shitware', a VPN, not so fast, there's no AES-ni, etc.. Though for the common home hobbyist this could be more than enough to run a dozen servers and the same amount of clients without a glitch

Fair enough and each to their own and their needs of course. How fast is your WAN?

Then there is said in this thread you should consider using ecc because you may need to reboot because of problems.. and the root cause would be non-ecc! really?,  cmon don't make me laugh, boxes here run for ever without ecc, I run a debian server on an Upboard first edition which easily achieves an uptime of 150 days++(mostly rebooted due to kernel upgrades, the supermicro board(OPNsense) also has no trouble with this), ecc would maybe (very maybe) have an effect on self healing file-systems like ZFS though, if one bit more is destroyed in a million it's still not repairable.

ECC has much lower failure rate than non-ECC RAM. And non-ECC RAM is more likely to cause system instability by memory errors. That doesn't mean all non-ECC systems are inherently unstable, and most of the world's computers still run non-ECC RAM. While a large proportion of the world's enterprise servers run ECC, as do many professional workstations aimed at CAD, audio/video production, medical imaging, etc. At the end of the day, all about risk assessment and choice. Personally I run ECC on my NAS but currently non-ECC on my OPNSense router (which is still very stable) - but next build will probably be ECC.

Oh and than IPMI, for your home server, why? do you run some datacenter at home? agreed nice toys which you use a few times, but you need it?, I think you don't, my 50 cents.

I find it extremely practical. Saves having to carry the server to somewhere you can plug it into a screen and keyboard, or vice versa. Even BIOS updates and config changes can be done remotely over the network. Again YMMV depending on your layout / setup at home.

[qinohe]

Hey @rungekutta, thanks for the answer;)
My internet is not fast 30/4, but enough for here..

I know ECC has better specs, but why would a home user/hobbyist need that unless the filesystem used is in par with that, F.I. a NAS with ZFS.
Also I know this is evolution, but why spend my dollar(yet) if the need is not that high!

IPMI, nice I know it's useful in some cases and I see your pros., but than again, for a home hobbyist?
The only reason I reacted was that for most home users a second hand server board ECC or not, is mostly sufficient.
Buy a refurbished cheap quad gigabit card, probably from a datacenter, you'll mostly be more than fine.
Don't think your network will only run good with 'the latest and greatest' I myself find it challenging to use small hardware(low specs)
I'm a hobbyist in heart and soul;)

[daquirm]

Regarding IPMI, I manage everything through an Ipad at home if possible, if iOS doesn’t work with IPMI, I use VNC to a VM through wich I use the IPMI. I have no big monitor at home I use now. Yeah it saves my time running through home finding a monitor, puting everything out of rack and playing with cables and HW....I used to use small 7 inch monitor for devices without IPMI and keyoboard...yeah that sucked..

Regarding ECC, why not to pay for that the difference, on the whole system how much extra is it exactly 10%? It almost guarantees stability, while non ecc could do until it doesn’t..same with RAID, why to use that..basically you want to mitigate the risk of reconfiguring your router because of data loss due to hw failure...as I have written I use ZFS on dual USB pendrives and RAM disk with PFSense, it’s cheaper than using single SSD...what some pay for electricity using desktop grade HW, I’d rather pay on stability using server grade HW where it makes sense...Which might be different for everyone...if I was ok with home grade, I’d use AsusWRT and not an actual firewall...

[rungekutta]

Hey @rungekutta, thanks for the answer;)
My internet is not fast 30/4, but enough for here..
[...]
Buy a refurbished cheap quad gigabit card, probably from a datacenter, you'll mostly be more than fine.
Don't think your network will only run good with 'the latest and greatest' I myself find it challenging to use small hardware(low specs)
I'm a hobbyist in heart and soul;)

We both run OPNSense at home so are clearly both tinkerers ;-) but coming at this from different perspectives. You enjoy repurposing and pushing low spec hardware to the limit - all respect to that. I'm more from the perspective of building solutions that just run and run, and I like headroom... also, my WAN connection is 33x faster than yours, those speed are not uncommon here where I live (and the teenagers at home expect them ;-)). So if your CPU can just about manage your connection, by extrapolation I'd need 33x more performance if the router is not going to be the bottleneck... In real terms it's probably more like 10x according to passmark and that currently allows me 80% of my WAN capacity with IDS switched on which is good enough... right now ;-)

As for ECC... it doesn't add much to the overall cost these days if you choose components carefully so I'd definitely get it if I did a new build tomorrow. YMMV.

[qinohe]

@rungekutta, I respect everyone's choice 

If I had a similar speed you do and would get the most out of it I would buy a Xeon with NVME etc.
So for sure it depends on your WAN speed and what you do with the network.
However, I do think it's a good idea to investigate and check out what you really need, could safe a lot of $$

I'm still not convinced using ECC for the firewall, I read a lot about it in the past, you didn't erase that 

Of course everyone here on OPNsense that need a new router should visit the appliance shop and think about buying one of their products.. Just thinking about that, I'm curious(I will check later) if their product use ECC..
Greetings, mark

[Antaris]

Of course everyone here on OPNsense that need a new router should visit the appliance shop and think about buying one of their products.. Just thinking about that, I'm curious(I will check later) if their product use ECC..
Greetings, mark

Exactly!

[daquirm]

Their appliances seem to use similar embedded AMD processors like APU2 by https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm very dated I have no idea why would anyone use that expecially for the price of Deciso...I’d buy rather something more enterprise and contribute back to the project via donation unless you need their support, where I could understand why to pay extra...Yeah AMD seems to use ECC but depends on MB vendor implementation: https://www.amd.com/Documents/amd-embedded-guide.pdf

[rungekutta]

Their appliances seem to use similar embedded AMD processors like APU2 by https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm very dated I have no idea why would anyone use that expecially for the price of Deciso...I’d buy rather something more enterprise and contribute back to the project via donation unless you need their support, where I could understand why to pay extra...

Agreed, unfortunately. Maybe the lower end models offer a reasonable package, although very modest performance with embedded low-end AMDs as you say. But moving up the value chain with their embedded A10 quad core models, you’re approaching SuperMicro Xeon server territory in terms of pricing, with higher performance in orders of magnitude and better expandability etc.

[daquirm]

What abou AMD EPYC 3000: https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Embedded/EPYC3000/
Are there drivers for that?

[Antaris]

What abou AMD EPYC 3000: https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Embedded/EPYC3000/
Are there drivers for that?

This boards will be very good with additional 2 to 4 SFP+ interfaces.

[ruffy91]

What abou AMD EPYC 3000: https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Embedded/EPYC3000/
Are there drivers for that?

This boards will be very good with additional 2 to 4 SFP+ interfaces.

Ecept that it says 10GBase-T on the cover page and 8xSATA 3 but there are only boards with Quad GBit and 4xSATA3

[Antaris]

What abou AMD EPYC 3000: https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Embedded/EPYC3000/
Are there drivers for that?

This boards will be very good with additional 2 to 4 SFP+ interfaces.

Ecept that it says 10GBase-T on the cover page and 8xSATA 3 but there are only boards with Quad GBit and 4xSATA3

That's what i mean. I can't see the on the board...

[rungekutta]

Bleeding edge... not sure you can even buy them yet? Looks promising though.