New Mini PC Hardware

[rpsmith]

Ordered the following from Amazon:

2016 new products barebone Mini PC J1900 Quad core CPU, 4 LAN (Intel), VGA
One year warranty
http://www.qotom.net/goods-129-QOTOM-Q190G4+4+LAN+Mini+PC.html
seller: Qotom  $159 (+ $30 DHL shipping from China)

120GB Kingston mSATA SSD  $49.50

8GB Crucial RAM (single) Notebook Memory  $25.99

So for around $265 you get a killer 4 port OPNsense firewall!

Had zero problems installing OPNsense.  Hardware looks very solid.

My new goto hardware for new customers!

RPSmith...

[Zeitkind]

Noticed them recently, look nice, esp. with Intel NICs and not Realtek. Could you see the manufacturer of the motherboard? There are a bunch of simular ITX-boards flowing around aliexpress eg.
http://www.aliexpress.com/price/j1900-router_price.html

[rpsmith]

I believe I read a thread somewhere where that question was asked and the reply was it's a proprietary motherboard.

It has been running flawlessly now for several weeks.  Long term, only time will tell.

RPSmith... 

[hedberg]

I bought one about a month ago for a small test and it runs fine. It could, using around 20-25% CPU time, route traffic at gigabit speed between two interfaces  (Measured using NTttcp and two laptops each connected to the J1900 machine).

A shame that the original manufacturer is unknown - hence no BIOS updates, driver updates (if one would use it for something else than Opnsense).

Did you manage to get a wifi card working with it? I bougt multiple cheap old pci express wifi cards, but didnt managed to get opnsense to detect any of them.

[rradu92]

I'm waiting for this mini pc too, anyone know the max throughtput?

I'm buying it for testing purpose but If it goes OK I will deploy this firewall arround all the campings and hotels.

The main purpose is web filtering and intrusion detection, i do all the other stuff (radius, captive portal, etc)  with miktorik core routers.

[sersis]

This seems a very good one!
Another one that I'm looking for is this one on AliExpress (it's similar but more cheaper):

https://it.aliexpress.com/item/HCiPC-B201-M12-HCL-SJ1900-4LA-Atom-D525-82583V-4LAN-Mini-Firewall-Barebone-4LAN-Mini-Router/32722987816.html?spm=2114.010208.3.61.Oxdguv&ws_ab_test=searchweb201556_10,searchweb201602_1_10057_10056_10065_10055_10054_10069_10059_10058_10017_10072_10070_10060_10061_10052_10062_10053_10050_10051,searchweb201603_1&btsid=5fb275dc-e63f-4ba2-a9ab-c27d1367375b


Do you know an European distributor for one or both of them?

[sersis]

I found an online store that sells similar systems in Europe .
The prices are higher , but it takes away the problems of imports from China.

This is the store:

http://www.mini-itx.com

And this is a similar product: http://www.mini-itx.com/store/~JBC375-F533



Do you know others?

[Zeitkind]

Well, I had very bad experiences with older boards made by Jetway (unstable, creepy caps, bad PCB-design and such). They also had bad support (not existing...), so Jetway is on my personal no-buy-list. Before buying Jetway, I even take those cheapies from aliexpress.. ^^
Of course, things could have changed..

[bartjsmit]

I'd prefer a Braswell equivalent for crypto offload. The Bay Trail CPU's don't do AES-NI.

Bart...

[chemlud]

Bought a box with an Atom D525 and 4x RJ45 (Intel) on an MSI MS-9877, doing very fine for some 7 months now. Only added a silent fan on top of the CPU to keep everything at ambient temp... :-)

Bought the box here

http://www.tx-team.de/

[skywalker007]

I also bought just one of those Qotom J1900 based boxes from Aliexpress.
It has a 256GB SSD. Can someome advise how to set that up?
I had nanoBSD (pfsense) so far on Alix boards. Would you advise to go with the nano option on OPNsense for this box as well? Ideally I would prefer a full install, but have the OS configured that it does frequent writes like logs to a RAM disk which get's synced to the disc once in a while. But I don't think that is something OPNsense does out of the box.
Thanks for any feedback!
Till

[franco]

skywalker007,

Go with the VGA install and enable /var and /tmp memory file system, which is as good as the nano install, and even better, because you can use the full disk instead of just 2 GB for the active slice.

With the root partition on the bulk amount of disk (over 100 GB) it'll not wear out as much as it would with a Nano install, think about all firmware upgrades that need to be downloaded, extracted and then installed on both systems likewise. The wear-down is way more destructive on the small Nano root partition.  It was designed for CF/SD cards or USB sticks.


Cheers,
Franco

[cake]

I bought one of these Qotom J1900 boxes earlier this year. Its been running great. 10 watts power consumption, 110-230V 3 prong power adapter. CPU runs about 53C at idle in a room that is 40C. The BIOS has a lot of settings in it, took me a while to find out where to tell it to automatically reboot when AC comes back. OPNsense installs flawlessly.

I am coming from a Asus consumer router (high performance), as it bricked itself during/after a thunderstorm I took the plunge and bought one. Wish I did it a long time ago.

I think this Qotom J1900 is a money making cash cow. It is probably one of a tiny few boxes being produced that is well suited for home/small business with its low power consumption, and 4 intel nics. The only thing missing is AES-NI, however it runs openvpn fast enough with out it from what I have read. The BIOS is a little undocumented as well.

Take the plunge, if anyone is on the fence about replacing your home router with this. You will be grinning after it arrives in the mail. I would use a dedicated AP though. As mentioned above the box is unbranded.

[charlielam]

running an asrock qc5000/wifi board.  while it uses about 4x as much wattage as my old soho router, the performance is badass.  the only thing that sucks is the wifi port is essentially useless and 1xnic.  had to get a pci-e nic to get it working the way i wanted it to.  but this may work out the way i want to since i am currently switching everything to fiber.  now if i can figure out how to get a mellanox connectx2 working on opnsense...

the pfsense guys on their forums were irritating to say the least stating i needed a $1k setup (1u rackmount system).  these itx boards are awesome for this sort of stuff imo. 

[permag02]

I just got my Qotom J1900  but  having a hard time because the 16.7 installer can't seem to work. I tried every available download but can't make this install. I tried pfsense memstick install and it worked. Shouldn't the install be almost the same.  Write with Rufus on usb? Am I missing something?