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The Holy Grail of Home Lab and Office Hardware

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Docholliday:
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

phoenix:
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.

Greelan:
I very much like my ThinkCentre m720 Tiny. Has a CPU fan but is pretty quiet overall. I’ve got the Intel 4 port NIC installed

Deciso themselves have some nice looking appliances although they are on the expensive side

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

Docholliday:
Ugh. I will back away slowly now

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