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Comment by skazazes | Hacker News Reader

These small boxes make for great homelab servers. I use a Topton box from AliExpress[1] as a router/VM/container host and love it. It has an iGPU in case SHTF, and 4 individual 2.5GB Ethernet ports. The only thing it really lacks is out of band management.

Run pfsense/opn in a VM, plug in WAN/AP/NAS/Desktop and you have a lightning fast network/development lab (by home use standards at least).

Even if you were not planning on using it as a lab, one of these kinds of boxes and a strong AP beats out even the high-end consumer focused routers all in ones without breaking a sweat at ~50W

A long time ago I ran a rack-mount Dell R710 with an external disk shelf. It drew ~600W from what I remember and had a fraction of the power

[1] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804669109631.html?spm=a2g...

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Even if you want to do 25gbit + you are still better off building a custom pc [1] than buying any dedicated routing hw. At least right now they are still very loud and cost way more. Plus as you said you can use it as a vm host for all kinds of stuff.

[1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/wiring-a-home-with-fiber/...

I use an i3 on an x11 Supermicro board with ecc memory. Upgrading to 10gbit was easy. Once hardware costs comes down I may go to 25 or 100.

I suspect that a modest X11 Supernicro board alone is more expensive that this whole NUC from the article.

Also, it's 2-3 times larger, just the board.

That is, it's a great thing to have, but it's a different class of hardware.

The x11 board was less than $350 and the i3 was $140. I think I spend more on RAM than the board.

Depends what exactly you want to do with the traffic. NAT v4 out to the internet at 25G? Yeah, nothing is going to beat the price for performance of a software box. Route+switch your home lab at 25G? You can get a 4 port 100G (up to 16 ports of 25G via breakout) line rate hardware offloaded performance using a $700 MikroTik switch which runs pretty damn quiet (and you can always throw in Noctuas if you really want it dead silent).

Lovely post. I enjoyed reading it :)

I am so jealous of your ISP situation! I’ve got symmetric gigabit from Verizon FiOS, which is great for what it is, but there is zero roadmap to anything faster in the US.

You can look at commercial offerings, but they charge way more for much less speed on a dedicated line. The cable folks are bragging that they hit 10Gbit in the lab, but no indication of when they will actually sell that. 25G is a fantasy.

The only reason we have this is because the people of the city voted for requiring every home to have fiber. It cost a lot of tax payer money but now the infrastructure exists and is run by the state owned power/phone company. Any private provider can use the infrastructure to offer what ever they want and since the fiber has no real limit on speed, it just depends on what's attached to the ends. Every home has 4 (usually 2 terminated) strands p2p directly to the POP.

There has been on going battle in the courts because the state owned phone company started using p2mp fiber connections for new runs which limit the maximum speed to what ever hardware they have installed in the split. However they have now backed off because it looks like the state will rule against them as it is anti-competitive. Also requires power for the split which is not very green all because they save around USD 50 per link.

So it isn't all roses and takes effort by the people but if you ever get the chance to vote on municipal fiber/infrastructure do it. Even here in Switzerland we have a lot of people who do not understand this and it took a lot of effort. They are even defending the phone companies use of p2mp.

Thanks for sharing! I agree that publicly-owned, privately-operate fiber to the home network is currently the gold standard. The Baby Bells are lobbying hard for regulatory barriers to this[0] but there are some success stories like Chattanooga [1].

I'm definitely interested to support these efforts. Wireless Wide Area Networks are not gonna cut it. If we get the baseline up to 10g, all sorts of new applications and architectures will be feasible.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

[1] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/

I definitely agree about using boxes like the one being reviewed here as mini homelab servers, but I tend to prefer the actual router be a separate device. For one thing, the ASRock box only has a single Ethernet port, which isn't ideal for a router (yes, you can use a managed switch and VLANs to make it work, but that's not always optimal either). I think there's also value in keeping your router separate from a reliability and security standpoint. I use a box similar to the ASRock as a VM server and a fitlet[1] as a dedicated router running Opnsense. Tiny homelab footprint and super reliable so far.

[1] https://fit-iot.com/web/products/fitlet2/

… but you are comparing a reasonably priced Chinese box with multiple LAN (ideal for router) with a $1000 single Ethernet box. Kinda not the same thing.

I like used enterprise level small factor PCs for home server. Lots of cheap parts on eBay, decent performance and low TDP. For example, HP EliteDesk 800 series.

I'd love it if someone produced a reasonably priced mini-pc with a pci-e slot

(of course it wouldn't be so mini...)

more or less like servethehome's tinyminymicro project (but not relying on used equipment from 3 years ago)

Do you know about the Minisforum B550?

It has an external PCI-E 16x male port that goes into a small dock/riser where you can plug a graphics card for instance.

https://droix.co.uk/blogs/minisforum-b550-review/

A second review with a different conclusion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihcGnBjUAm4

Not so reasonably priced, so it maybe does not fit your criteria.

You can get flexible risers to turn the m.2 slot into a PCI-e 4x

Have you heard of zima board?

https://www.zimaboard.com/

Zimaboard has a PCIe external expansion, 2 external SATA ports, and 2 NICs. Low power, passively cooled.

Too bad it is using a CPU from 2016. At that point its competing with substantially better used hardware that is less expensive.

Intel has the NUC Extremes which offer a full x16 slot in a fairly small footprint. The Core of the computer itself looks like a small GPU, and it plugs into a daughter board that acts as a coupler for its two x16 slots.

I think most people throw GPU's in them but I don't see a reason why you couldn't just fit it with a nice NIC

What are you using to run VM's and containers?

I run Debian and install Docker and Proxmox on it

Is ECC an option?

On the linked Topton box from Aliexpress, in theory it could be given the architecture but the product description specifically says non-ecc sodims

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