Hi everyone, first post to hopefully leverage this community’s expertise. I’m looking to set up an OPNSense/openwrt router/firewall soon, in conjunction with wiring my house with Cat6 and installing Wi-Fi 7 APs. I found the following on my local marketplace and wanted to get some thoughts on whether this is a good candidate for the job. I’m intrigued by the existing 10Gbe, and the 1U rack mount form factor, but uncertain about investing into a very old Xeon platform. I’m also worried it will consume ridiculous amounts of power compared to a newer system.
What do you think? Is it a good option? Justified for the price?
Power consumption should be your main driver here. You can get low powered PCs with enough ports to do this. This will become an appliance and you want it to run as efficient as possible.
The UCG Fiber is a great solution as it is very frugal compared to a Xeon. But if you want to own your own router I know that Tomaž Zaman is building his own router, and I would look into that because the hardware is intended to maximize power efficiency at being a router:
But of course you can get away with some other mini PCs with SFP+ and the like, similar to those reviewed by Serve the Home:
Thanks for the suggestion. This is helpful as a price comparison but I think I’d like to avoid Unifi hardware in my setup. I’d like to design around local-first and cloud/Vendor-independence, and my impression is that Unifi is more of an ecosystem to buy into. Hence I’m leaning towards Opnsense for firewall/routing. Admittedly I’m not familiar with Unifi so maybe my impression isn’t correct.
UniFi runs locally, therefore why you need a “controller” capable device. While it does have integrations, you can access it locally.
With that being said, I ran OpnSense until power draw became the main concern for me. And it was capable of all of these things. I would seriously look at those mini PCs that have guaranteed networking/router hardware, as they’ll have the hardware support needed for a low power consumption (I used a Lenovo m720q as my router, but the power draw was a bit much)
I wasn’t aware of Mikrotek so thanks for sharing! I think I want something with a bit more firewall capability but it’s great to know these routers exist.
Yeah, I just tend to be wary of any brands that seem to depend on investing into the entire ecosystem. My impression is that you’re buying certain features and functionalities that you only really “unlock” by combining with other of the same brand hardware.
I already decided on Omada APs and picked up a Brocade PoE switch from eBay. So I’d like to avoid ending up feeling like I should have gone all in on another ecosystem.
This could also be an option with similar capabilities:
It’s very similar to the mini-pc’s but it’s a US company that does offer support and can use core boot firmware.
With the Xeon system I’d mostly ‘worry’ about power use, while performance will be pretty mediocre by today’s standards. Missing is ECC, ipmi though. I don’t think ECC is such a big deal for routers (I think enterprise routers don’t have it either?), but may be a factor if you want to have other services on there too.
Thanks for linking this option too. Agreed ECC is irrelevant for me, and IPMI is a nice to have but definitely not a dealbreaker. Fingers crossed the device will be stable enough to rarely ever need that!
Also neat that this is US based. While a lot of the mini pc options are enticing, I admit that security has been a concern of mine as well. Nameless Chinese mini PCs designed to be your firewall? Talk about a great attack vector. Not sure if the US devices are any better though, you’re still trusting the manufacturer to some degree
IPMI on a router is of limited benefit because if your router is down you’d need to be at home to access the IPMI any way. IMO. Unless you go full high availability but that’s a different story I guess
Well, how about flipping the questions around @tony_ravioli. What are the features that you need? (# of ports, port speed, storage, device throughput, power consumption)
If you want a device certified in the US or Europe, you’ll be paying a pretty penny compared to the same device from AliExpress, but ultimately depends on how much you want your wallet to hurt.
I have another switch so really I just need one 10gb LAN port. Decent enough specs for Opnsense but I have another server I will use for other services (I. E. I won’t be running containers on this thing). I have a small network rack so any form factor that I can throw in there even if it’s just sitting on a shelf. I know that’s pretty wide open, and I think lends itself well to the mini PCs already mentioned.
Was reading from the StH forums that this guy was recommended - a 28W Total TDP with 4 SFP+ 10G and 5 x 2.5G Ethernet. Doesn’t look bad, and given that it has somewhat of an endorsement from the StH community, would consider this a good choice.
