Need some help to find hardware

[jankristian]

Hi.

I'm trying to find the best solution for my home network. I want to separate my network so that i have one for the apartment we rent out, and two or three private networks.

I am struggling a bit to find hardware that isn't too expensive. I need something that is affordable (resonable) and stable. The line from my isp is for now 300mb.

I'm thinking of bying some switches and ap's from ubiquiti, and if opnsense too much of a hassle/ hard for me, maybe the udm pro.

[meazz1]

if cpu and power supply fan noise is anot an issue I would build or buy a small form faction motherboard, a gig pci exp nic card and a power supply and you have a powerful box.
 A decent mobo+cpu+ram combo you can get for less than $150.00.

[jankristian]

Do I need a special main board? I looked at pfsense website, and they don't support all kind of cpus for example. And is the best solution to separate the networks with vlans on a switch or with multiple nics on the pc?

[monstermania]

Hi,
a small/stable solution is the APU4-series board from PC-Engines.
https://www.varia-store.com/en/produkt/51978-pc-engines-apu4d4-system-board-4x-lan-4-gb-ram.html
With case, power supply and ssd the hw costs around 200€.

Also the qotom-devices sells on aliexpress works fine with opnsense. Search for qotom into forum, will show you many entrys about such devices.

best regards
Dirk

[meazz1]

Hi,
a small/stable solution is the APU4-series board from PC-Engines.
https://www.varia-store.com/en/produkt/51978-pc-engines-apu4d4-system-board-4x-lan-4-gb-ram.html
With case, power supply and ssd the hw costs around 200€.

Also the qotom-devices sells on aliexpress works fine with opnsense. Search for qotom into forum, will show you many entrys about such devices.

best regards
Dirk

I have a mobo with intel I5 cpu and 8 gig ram, it runs just fine.

[MrB]

My current low budget solution is a used i3 NUC (/w single Gbit NIC) & 8-port managed switch that does VLANs, set me back 120 euros in total.

Network is split into 4 VLANs (home, work, iot, guest) and since they are isolated and the uplink is only 200/20 Mbit, it works fine for my use case. I'm not saturating the single NIC and haven't had any issues so far, but as always YMMV.

[qarkhs]

I'm running a Fitlet2 J3455 https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/. Small, fanless, low-power, runs cool, well-constructed. I bought the barebones model (currently $162). I have a 128GB M.2 SSD card, 8GB of RAM and the card with the extra two Intel Ethernet ports (for a total of 4) installed. When I bought them, those parts were about $40 each on Amazon. It has been running Opnsense for around a year with no problems. It provides network coverage for a two apartment house across three floors. The network is both wired and wireless. I have a 16 port switch and 3 Ubiquity APs  using PoE. I haven't gotten round to setting up VLANs but that was the plan.

[2Gnu]

I'll second the Fitlet2 recommendation.  Also using the J3455 model, paired with Ubiquiti for WiFi.