[SLOVED] AliExpress or Amazon Prime Day Deals?

[jbard]

Hi All,

I eventually did purchase a system and wanted to share with everyone what I did and how it turned out.

I was and still am a fan of Protectli, but I ended up not going with them. I really wanted 16G for "future proofing" the system, and they didn't have this available in a system at a good price for me. Instead, I went with a Topton N5105 with (4) i226 which I got with no memory or storage for $115 on a "special". I chose the N5105 because of the price and because I read that while the N100 had higher peak performance, the N5105 was on par for steady loads, at least within a given thermal envelope. Also, I had a 4G DDR4 stick laying around to test with the N5105, along with a small SSD to test with.

Once I confirmed the system would boot and behave normally, I purchased 2x8G=16G Crucial ram and a 250G Kingston nvme disk for less than $70. I installed these components and reinstalled the system from USB. I then ran the system on my bench for about a week, in and out of production, to see how the hardware performed and how OPNSense worked for my environment. (My first time running OPNSense.) My only concern was the temperature of the heat sink, which I knew would get warmer once I installed it in the closet, where all of my network gear lives. So I purchased a USB powered fan for less than $10. This fan has multiple speeds and happens to fit the form factor of the Topton perfectly. I removed the grate from one side and attached it to the Topton with double sided tape (also held in place by the wall mount.) On the low speed and when sitting on my work bench, the fan lowered the temp at least 5 degrees celsius. Once I installed it in the closet where the heat builds up more, the fan (still on low speed) lowered the temperature from over 70 to about 60 celsius. So I think getting the fan was a good choice.

My total cost is right around $200 and I've been very happy with the hardware and with OPNSense thus far. My initial motivation was to separate WLAN IOT devices from my home LAN (computers), and that is now accomplished. I bridged two of the ports for my APs (to avoid having to purchase another switch) and this was a little finicky to set up. But I eventually figured it out and it all seems to be working now. I'm using less than 10% of memory and less than 1% of disk, so I can easily grow the system going forward.

Still to do or may do:
 - investigate why my ChatGPT client now loses its connection more frequently, which seems to have started with use of OPNSense
 - review logs and improve firewall rules, spend some time with Unbound DNS
 - consider running ram disks for /tmp and logging (would want to sync logs to disk periodically)
 - consider security plugins like Suricata, Zenarmor, others?
 - consider use cases for squid or other caching
 - consider use cases for Tor or VPNs
 - reinstall on Proxmox to run both OPNSense and a Ubiquiti Unifi controller in a Docker container

Special thanks to @newsense, @cookiemonster, @meyergru and everyone else who chimed in.

Cheers!

-J