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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 29th, 2023

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  • If you’re not doing much computing, then the idle power consumption is much more important than the tdp, in which case the motherboard and other hardware are more important than the CPU. For your use case, something like a tinyminimicro 1L PC or a Celeron mini PC would be good. I’ve personally played around with

    • a dell optiples 3050 micro with an i5-7500t that idles about 6 watts
    • an AliExpress n5105 mini PC that idles about 8 watts
    • an AliExpress n100 3inch mini PC that idles about 5 watts
    • an Asus Chromebox 3 with an i7-8550u that idles about 4 watts Any of these have plenty of juice to run some docker containers and a media server assuming you don’t need to transcode multiple 4k streams simultaneously. I’m currently using the Chromebox as my proxmox server with 3-4 vms and maybe 20 docker containers/lxcs and it uses about 8-9 watts on average.

  • OPNsense will do what you want, although it’s probably overkill in this case. Also keep in mind that any switching it does will be purely software, so it might struggle to push heavy traffic through, especially if you add rules and vlans and such. Openwrt is more lightweight and should also work, or you could just install a general Linux OS like Ubuntu or debian and use iptables to route stuff. The better option though is to just get a proper switch, since those have hardware switching.