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 :-)
Seems like this could be pretty useful. Probably overkill for my needs, but it's nice that there are affordable fanless computers with this much power for 6W, now. We've come a long way from the Raspberry Pi Bi I started with!
They claim made in califoria anyway. they don't have any n100 though just slower last generation hardware. Maybe good enough, I'm looking for a jellyfin server now though.
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.
One thing oft overlooked is that alot of manufacturing of computer components is essentially illegal in other countries. Texas Instruments stopped producing in Texas because of Cancer claims/lawsuits and regulatory changes.
I have a Tplink Archer C7, which works great with OpenWRT. I also have a gl-inet device, which is fine, but WiFi reception is better with the C7.
If you end up buying a gl-inet device, first check if you can flash a recent mainline OpenWRT image on them. The modified OpenWRT they come with out of the box is often based on an outdated version.
I'm prepared to receive intimidation letters at my door! Thankfully I live in a country (Chile. Can't really hide it, since you can geolocate my server and see that indeed it's hosted there) where it wouldn't be very much valuable for [m3t4] to sue me, since they haven't signed with a law firm here from what I can see. It would be much easier for them to just try and keep their platform closed off, which would mean they kill the open aspect of the platform. It would also be a win for the Fediverse, who has not received it well. Heck, I don't like it as well.
The cloud is over-engineered and over-priced for personal projects and small groups. If you're a larger company and want high-availability and speed globally, then you're probably wanting a cloud provider nowadays unless you're really wanting to manage hardware yourself.
Setting up your own website for fun or something for your local business obviously doesn't need a fancy Kubernetes setup in EKS. Hell, even a moderate business could be fine if you're not expecting usage spikes or latency issues (although you'd probably want more than a repurposed desktop).
I'd have a slightly different take: managing things in-house is going to be cheaper if you have a competent team to do it. The existence of the cloud as a crucial infrastructure is because it is hard to come up with competent IT and sysadmin people. The market is offer-driven now. IT staff could help the company save money on AWS hosting but it could also be used in more crucial and profitable endeavour and this is what is happening.
I see it at the 2 organization I am working at: one is a startup which does have a single, overworked "hardware guy" who sets up the critical infra of the company. His highest priority is to maintain the machine with private information that we want to host internally for strategic reasons. We calculated that having him install a few machines for hosting our dev team data was the cheapest but after 3 months of wait, we opted out for a more expensive, but immediately available, cloud option. We could have hired a second one but our HR department is already having a hard time finding candidates for out crucial missions.
On the non-profits I am working on, there is a strong openness/open-hardware spirit. Yet I am basically the only IT guy there. I often joke they should ditch their Microsoft, Office and Google based tools, and I could help them do it, but I prefer to work on the actual open hardware research projects they are funding. And I think I am right in my priorities.
So yes, the Cloud is overpriced, but it is a convenience. Know what you pay for, know you could save money there and it may at some point be reasonable to do so. In the end that's a resource allocation problem: human time vs money.
How many companies need such a scale, but are not able to provide it inhouse for less money?
Everyone wants to be Netflix, but 99% of companies don't even need close to that amount of scalability. I'd argue, a significant part of projects could be run on a raspberry pi, if they'd be engineered properly.
Thanks, that looks like something I might have to try. :) Myself, over the network, I still don't do filesystem level incremental backups, sticking to either directories or virtual machine snapshots (both of which have their shortcomings).
I've been hearing about ZFS and its beneficial features for years now, but mainstream Linux installers don't seem to support it, and I can't be bothered to switch filesystems after installing.
Out of curiosity - can anyone tell, what might be blocking them?
Edit: answering my own question: legal issues. Licenses "potentially aren't compatible".
Due to potential legal incompatibilities between the CDDL and GPL, despite both being OSI-approved free software licenses which comply with DFSG, ZFS development is not supported by the Linux kernel. ZoL is a project funded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to develop a native Linux kernel module for its massive storage requirements and super computers.
Apart from the license incompatibility (which doesn't stop it from being used by distros, as Ubuntu has shown): While it's a fantastic filesystem for servers, it is also resource hungry and not suitable for small or portable systems.
This looks pretty cool. I'd also recommend Caddy, which is a very nice minimal web server that's designed for scalability. It's what I use at my home setup, but I should have a look at this one too.
Raspberry Pi has two CSI (camera serial interface) connectors on board, which is a considerable advantage over having to deal with USB webcams. This matters if your industrial robot must see the work area faster, your competition robot must run circles around opposing robots, or more sadly - if your drone must fly to war. :( On Raspberry Pi, in laboratory conditions (extreme lighting intensity), you can use the camera (with big ifs and buts) at 500+ frames per second, not fast enough to photograph a bullet, but fast enough to see a mouse trap gradually closing. That's impossible over USB and unheard of to most USB camera makers.
Optimized libraries
I know that Raspberry Pi has "WiringPi" (a fast C library for low level comms, helping abstract away difficult problems like hardware timing, DMA and interrupts) and Orange Pi recently got "WiringOP" (I haven't tried it, don't know if it works well). I don't know of anything similar on a PC platform, so I believe that on NUC, you'd have to roll your own (a massive pain) or be limited to kilohertz GPIO frequencies instead of megahertz (because you'd be wading through some fairly deep Linux API calls).
Antenna socket
Sadly, neither of them has a WiFi antenna socket. But the built-in WiFi cards are generally crappy too, so if you needed a considerable working area, you'd connect an external card with an external antenna anyway. Notably, some models of Orange Pi have an external antenna, and the Raspberry Pi Compute Module has one too.
Self-hosting
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