I’m a design student with a desk apart of a studio. I want to build an Intel NUC around Debian or Ubuntu to access Azure. This would be for rendering, so I could ease the workload off my laptop during projects.
There’s a wired(1Gb) & wireless connection available for my University network. How would you securely setup a NUC? Does this involve a VM or VPN? Any cool ideas for a network switch?
P.S: I recall a few concepts from University Cybersecurity courses & projects. Unfortunately I’m rusty.
NUC or small form factor PC? ASRock has a selection of DIY-focused case & motherboard (and PSU) combos if you want to go DIY-route.
Most managed switches and routers should be able to achieve “local isolation” in the sense of your devices only talking to each other and the laptop also reaching the outside world. Mikrotik hAP ac lite TC would be one example that can do that.
Various universities would setup their networks in various ways, at the end of the day, you can probably get a USB nic as a second nic for your small pc… and don’t bother with yet another box doing switching or routing.
Linux kernel firewall (netfilter/iptables/nftables) is good enough to hook up to internet directly.
Re Intel NUC, I’d actually recommend you looked into an AMD based solution. Intel had always been dragging their feet when it comes to fixing bugs in their linux drivers - if not for low-end Chromebooks I don’t think they’d bother at all. On the other hand, ever since AMD upstreamed their stuff as of about 5y ago, their hardware has mostly “just worked”.
With that in mind, you may want to look into gigabyte or beelink or minisforum mini PCs - there’s a bunch of tiny 6900hx and similar newer mini PCs.
Get a branded “Mini PC” if you care about security and functionality (aftermarket support, BIOS updates etc), avoid the “cheap” chinese stuff like Minisforum, Beelink etc. Do a careful evaluation of your performance requirements, bleeding edge will have issues so you probably want to go for at least one generation older. Do you need dedicated graphics or will built in do? If you’re concerned about network security just setup a firewall on your box, having a separate one is very wasteful for a single device.