I am looking at those kind of devices for a few weeks now because I need to replace my DD-WRT Router with something more powerful and reliable. I am aiming for those Mini PCs / Appliances with 2+ 2.5GbE network ports and went through dozens of “manufacturers” (many are just putting their label on it) and read hundreds of Forum posts, watched videos etc.

To me it comes down, that they do not differ that much and on my journey so far, these are the things I discovered:

• Many manufacturers still implement previous CPU generations. This one has a recent N100, so that´s good. The newer gens are usually more power efficient and produce less heat, so you have higher chances to run them fanless without burning your house down.
• If you want 2.5GbE, it is almost always Intel i225 for the older models and i226-V for the newer ones. And those seem to have issues with ASPM, which you need to turn off, depending how you plan to use them. And this adds a few extra Watts.
• With many “nameless” China boxes that are actually tested by people in Forums / Videos etc. it happens often, that they have to mod them. They either add fans to them because they get unreasonably hot, or the internals are sloppy built, so that hot components do not even touch the case properly to transmit the head. So be prepared to mod them if you get one you did not found a thorough review yet.
• Some build their Boxes still with DDR-4 memory, although they are on a new platform that would support DDR-5. Sometimes you see this in the product description, sometimes you see it when you bought it and opened the box.
• For many offers I have seen there is no information about the BIOS/EFI and what you can do there. I have seen / read tests, where you could barely change anything in the BIOS/EFI and are stuck with what the manufacturer configured for you.
• With the “nameless” boxes, the biggest issue I have is, that they do not even have proper descriptions of the built in components on their product page. The place where they advertise their product. If this information is not even there, I suspect long-time support and build quality is not better either.
• Sometimes the RAM is fixed and you can not change it, but with the sloppy product pages, you sometimes can not see this or it is not that obvious, so pay attention to that if you plan to use it for a long time and might want to upgrade the RAM.
• Sometimes you find the exact same hardware just relabeled. I looked at the Thomas Krenn LESv4 for example and found out that it is from Iwill. This is one example where I thought I get it from a German manufacturer and pay a bit extra to support them, but it’s just a relabel from a Chinese company. That’s not bad of course, just a heads up if you insist on buying something that is not coming from China… which is near impossible anyway in my opinion, because what kind of Electronics is not from there nowadays ;-)
• I am following Hardkernel for a while and their new H4 Series seems to tick all the boxes for me at the moment… apart from one: The Case! But they announced a “GC-Style” Case that is injection molded and will post pictures in 2 weeks, so I will wait to see how it looks and how it is built. I love how they nerd out on their Product pages. There is hardly anything you can not find there. They use current technology and offer it for a very fair price. They also seem to pay attention that you have plenty of room to tinker with the settings in their BIOS/EFI and they seem to put quite some though into how they build their stuff, so it also consumes the least amount of energy (which should mean less heat) than others. They even have the guts to host their own Forum, which is a big thing nowadays when you have to fear one Shitstorm after another if you do something that one person does not like. Their H4+ with the Netboard (adds 4 more NICs) and a SSD in a cozy case would be sweet, so I hope the new case they will release soon fits my needs.

That’s my 2 cents for today. Sorry for the long post, but since this is a topic I am doing research for myself to get me a good, fast, low energy, low heat hardware for a new OPNsense Firewall :-)

I think nowadays you will hardly find Hardware in that area that is not made in China, no matter where the company sits that sells it. There are a few, sure, but hardly in that price range, unfortunately.

Could it be an MTU issue? Networking van be weird if packets get fragmented unexpectedly, but I see this mostly for IKEv2 and other VPN Services. Try to lower your MTU on the WAN side Maybe?

Me too, I have a lot of fun with it this season.

Diablo 4 for me too. I did not play much last season, but this one I enjoy a lot. I like the changes regarding loot and crafting and I see myself finally using the Aspects now that they are not consumed, but can be pulled from the codex as often as I want. Previously I saved my good rolled aspects “for later”… and later was usually beyond my playtime for a season :-)

You would think so, yes. But to my surprise, my well over 60 Containers so far consume less than 7 GB of RAM, according to htop. Also, of course Containers can network and share services. For external access for example I run only one instance of traefik. Or one COTURN for Nextcloud and Synapse.

El Camino!

I would absolutely look into it. Many years ago when Docker emerged, I did not understand it and called it “Hipster shit”. But also a lot of people around me who used Docker at that time did not understand it either. Some lost data, some had servicec that stopped working and they had no idea how to fix it.

Years passed and Containers stayed, so I started to have a closer look at it, tried to understand it. Understand what you can do with it and what you can not. As others here said, I also had to learn how to troubleshoot, because stuff now runs inside a container and you don´t just copy a new binary or library into a container to try to fix something.

Today, my homelab runs 50 Containers and I am not looking back. When I rebuild my Homelab this year, I went full Docker. The most important reason for me was: Every application I run dockerized is predictable and isolated from the others (from the binary side, network side is another story). The issues I had earlier with my Homelab when running everything directly in the Box in Linux is having problems when let´s say one application needs PHP 8.x and another, older one still only runs with PHP 7.x. Or multiple applications have a dependency of a specific library when after updating it, one app works, the other doesn´t anymore because it would need an update too. Running an apt upgrade was always a very exciting moment… and not in a good way. With Docker I do not have these problems. I can update each container on its own. If something breaks in one Container, it does not affect the others.

Another big plus is the Backups you can do. I back up every docker-compose + data for each container with Kopia. Since barely anything is installed in Linux directly, I can spin up a VM, restore my Backups withi Kopia and start all containers again to test my Backup strategy. Stuff just works. No fiddling with the Linux system itself adjusting tons of Config files, installing hundreds of packages to get all my services up and running again when I have a hardware failure.

I really started to love Docker, especially in my Homelab.

Oh, and you would think you have a big resource usage when everything is containerized? My 50 Containers right now consume less than 6 GB of RAM and I run stuff like Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Homeassistant, Mosquitto, multiple Kopia instances, multiple Traefik Instances with Crowdsec, Logitech Mediaserver, Tandoor, Zabbix and a lot of other things.

Oh wow! That looks like a pretty unique experience. I have a pen, indeed! Thank you very much :-)

I always miss Demos for games, but totally forgot that on Steam you can refund within the first 2 hours of gameplay. It should not hurt if it´s used rarely. I can not figure out yet if Slay the Spire is for me (for some games it is pretty clear when reading about them), so this one might be a good opportunity to test it out.

I played Mini Metro on Android a long time ago… did not remember that I might have it on Windows already too! I think it was in a bundle at one time. Thanks :-)

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Thanks for the suggestion. “Unfortunately” I grew up with those and know probably each one of them inside out, as they have been replayed multiple times over the decades. But I did not think about SCUMMVM and reading this I get the urge to Talk to Mr. Tentacle Guy again :-)

Oh cool. That looks like it might also be a battery saver and not causing too much excess heat in the tablet :-)

I love Traefik! When I started, I tried NGinx, but could not wrap my head around it. So I tried Caddy. Pretty easy to understand andI used it for a while. Then I had demands Caddy could not do ant stumbled uponTraefik. As you said, a learning curve, butfor me much easier than NGinx. I like that you can put the Traefik config inside the Compose files and that the service only is active in Traefik when the actual Containers are up and running. I added Crowdsec to my external facing Traefik instance and even use a plain Traefik instance for all my internal services also. And it can forward http, https, TCP and UDP.

That´s a good idea. A Sci-Fi setting is a nice change from the classic Civ theme. I loved Alpha Centauri back then, could not stop playing. This might scratch that itch. Thank you :-)

That looks sweet! I never heard about that, looks like a whole series. That´s on the list :-)

Oh yes! That one was fantastic. It´s been a long time. Wasn´t it part of the very first Humble bundle?

That´s quite a list! Thank you :-) I even have a few on that list and will try them out. I did not think about The Witness, but it´s worth a try. I did not finis it on PC, but it has some really hard puzzles in it that keep you occupied for a while at the same place without the need to move around a lot.

The Hexcells series is awesome, played through all of them (of course not through all the random ones in Infinite ;-)), but might be worth to try again on the tablet. I tried Tametsi (also a puzzler), but it did not scale with the High DPI screen and was super tiny.

Thank you for your feedback! I get the impression that it might work if used on a small scale when it´s not public. I guess I will have a new container soon :-)