With 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, this would make a great pfSense/OpenBSD router.
Too bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.
now it's the same price of any itx board. with the same high power profile.
for the last 4 years anyone could spend $40 on a itx board with 12v power input, plus $40 for a fully featured ia64 AMD5350 APU, and have exactly what you describe for 35W (or 55 under load)
I wouldn't normally comment on something like this, but I noticed this mistake twice in the linked post as well. ia64 refers to Itanium, while amd64/x86-64/x64 refer to the 64-bit version of x86.
Odroid was never the cheapest option, but they provided outstanding software support and great product reliability.
Now, in the x86 space both of those things (software support, reliability) are not an issue. Besides, there are much cheaper options available on the market (e.g.
https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/cSJOvljS , same platform with 4GB ddr4, 64gb emmc, case, power supply for ~$140 shipping included).
So I reckon you're right, this product won't be too successful.
Even when it is stable one would never achieve the same speed with their implementation (well, some occasional segfaults in FreeBSD depending on the NIC and pfsense version), Realtek can work good enough -just not optimal and not always reliable. Too bad - otherwise it looks like a good board.
> With 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, this would make a great pfSense/OpenBSD router.
Please note that opnsense also exists. It does most (all?) of what pfsense can do but has a much saner organisation and team behind it that doesn't resort to character assassination to promote their product.
I'll spare you the drama but if you care at all, look it up and choose opnsense rather than pfsense.
I could see this being a great home server - it could easily run NAS, Plex, a firewall, and some misc containers. It may be a cheaper option for robotics projects that don't need the compute ability of a NVidia Jetson.
Pretty awesome board:
- Intel J4105 (2.3Ghz Quad-core, fanless!)
- Up to 32GB DDR4
- M.2 SSD (4 x PCIe 2.0)
- 2 x GbE
- 2 x SATA 3.0
- HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 at 4k
- 2xUART, 2xI2C - both at 3.3V
- 110x110x43mm
- Expected to ship in late November, price will be above $100
If this isn't powerful enough, there's LattePanda model (I think it's the Alpha model) that runs a Core m3. It's significantly more expensive at around $300 though.
Me too. I bought their handheld "gaming console", the odroid-go, and have it running ZX Spectrum ROMs. Lovely piece of kit, and fun to program against too.
Realtek are known for being cheap rather than having good performance. However I've never had a particular problem with them under Linux, they have all worked reliably enough. What's the actual issue? If it's an issue with Linux (ie software) then couldn't it be fixed?
Sounds like an excellent way to get those students into programming open source software mixed with hardware troubleshooting. Both very valuable skills in the outside world.
For some: yes! But for most physics students it's an annoying linux experience that will make them go back to windows which they also get for free from the university.
Grandparent posting said "Realtek in linux is an irreperable[sic] shitshow" which I take to mean that it must work in some other operating system like Windows, so it would be a software issue.
Now if they had said "Realtek is a shitshow (but hey, it's cheap!)" I would agree :-)
Then maybe take that wifi and ethernet are not the same, and that e.g. intel nakes good cpus but bad gpu, and amd, in comparison, the opposite (until recently at least)?
Don't throw all into one bin.
Support-wise, Intel makes excellent GPUs! (Unless the recent generations stopped having great open-source drivers? I admit I don't always keep up to speed with the latest hardware.)
I'm speaking about performance here, but yes, intel drivers seem to be pretty good (though my Haswell GPU seems to crash X11 after reactivating the screen(s) after they got blanked due to inactivity, if X11 had a now-unplugged Displayport screen configured before) (arch/xmonad) ).
I bought a fun little kit from these folks, the ODROID Go. A little assemble it yourself Gameboy. IIRC, it's got a dual core xtensa chip based off the next gen of the mcu used in the teensy. Good stuff.
They should have go with N3150, not dropping it because it was one step older. I bought a nice mini pc on aliexpress on N3150, 2 NICs, AES-NI, perfect OPNsense home router. It will last a decade. Fanless, small alum unibody.
I think you answered your own question - there were plenty of cheap Chinese boards out, so why bother? A big thing for these SBC manufacturers is finding the right niche they want to go for/believe they can maximize sales over the product lifetime.
I usually like all Odroid products but fail to understand the reason behind making those general purpose boards -beside being excellent for prototyping and development- which will probably cost more than a specialized one and can lack important features often due to space constraints. Can economics be the only reason? For example, although this board can do its job as a firewall, a NAS, or a workstation, what if Odroid made three different models, say:
model A: 3 NICs, no audio, no video, no SATA, aimed at firewalls with DMZ
model B: 1 or 2 NICs, again no audio and no video though a minimum of 2 to 4 SATA ports
to be used as NAS/server machines w/software RAID etc.
model C: more powerful CPU, just 1 NIC, audio, video and 1 SATA port to be used as a client/MPC etc.
Would the higher cost of producing 3 specialized boards exceed the benefits of making general purpose ones where for example a powerful and costly GPU is left unused because the user had no alternatives to consider for building his file server? I for one would seriously consider purchasing the first two (as I did with other pcengines.ch firewall boards in the past).
I got a similar board from another brand recently (quad-core Intel x64, 8 GB RAM, SATA). Going to use a general-purpose dev- and personal-services always-on host. Generally headless but I'll still have HDMI connected to my main display for when the need arises.
This is a missed opportunity for ARM but its one they consciously took. Even after years of single boards the support for drivers was always abysmal, more of a kick the football around to various stakeholders for open source developers so these single boards never amounted to anything.
And the entire ecosystem has stagnated in terms of performance and improvements so there is no excitement for the future.
Starting a few years ago you could get a Apollo lake NUC for $120 and it would solve all the driver and software issues faced in the arm ecosystem and once you do that you begin to lose interest in all the arm boards because with x86 everything is compatible out of the box. And this seems to be the path Odroid has taken.
As someone who is definitely layman in the area, can somebody break it down to me why would people choose an RPi, ODroid, OrangePi or any other small and fanless computers for this or that scenario?
I am very interested in making a home NAS, a Pi-Hole, an OpenVPN server and possibly a VM host -- what are my options if I want a few servers in my bedroom with zero fan noise (even during the summer when the room temperature can be at 35-40 Celsius)? Or should I just sacrifice one floor of shelf space in my small storage room and make sure the machines have good fan cooling?
I've been meaning to inform myself on the subject but real life and job changes have been very annoying and I was recently shocked by the memory that "I've been meaning to do it" for like 2 years now.
So can somebody give a layman a few pros and cons of our options?
(I will definitely use Ethernet on all my home servers. Not interested in how good -- or existent -- their WiFi adapters are. It would even be a bonus for me if I can physically turn off the WiFi on them.)
You are opening a Pandora’s box :). There is truly no easy answer - too much depends on your budget, needs, OS of choice, etc.
A good way to start is to follow a few subreddits, like r/datahoarder or r/homelab to get some inspiration and understand what are the options etc.
But since you still need an answer, here is something to get you started: 1) For fanless and ease of setup, buy a Synology/QNAP NAS, and install additional software there - $300+ w/o disks. 2) For future proof, buy Dell T30 on eBay for $300 and install FreeNAS on it.
Eh, why Pandora's box? It's true I didn't give tons of details though.
...Is there any other option than Linux for a server OS? Like, practically? I know there are a bunch of others but speaking about everyday classic needs... is there really a choice?
Budget -- I never did mind paying $1000 instead of $150 but it has to be worth it. I don't want to sheepishly buy the latest and greatest, especially after seeing many times in my programming career how a very modest machine (when properly tuned) can be a very decent server that can last you all the way until you need rented dedicated servers in several data centers.
(Example: I gave up on the idea of an OpenVPN server on an RPi 3 after making a research on the expected bandwidth. It would be too small.)
Thanks for the recommendations! Writing them down (not joking).
I was half-joking, of course, and what I meant is that it’s an optimization problem with multiple dimensions and tons of trade-offs. E.g.,
- low power or performance?
- ease of use vs. tunability?
- closed vs. open-source?
For the server OS, your choices are practically either Linux or FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on the latter). If you don’t need zfs for NAS, OpenBSD becomes another interesting option - assuming the hardware is supported, is rock solid and easy to administrate, but may have some learning curve.
Tinkering with something like RaspberryPi is not a bad idea - you will spend $50 or so but will learn a ton and in the process will understand your own requirements better. However, if you want NAS, I recommend buying a server-class hardware (like T30 mentioned above) and invest time in understanding how to use zfs and do reliable backups, assuming your data is valueable. I personally don’t think you should aim for lower power for NAS with any serious amount of data.
I am not opposed to it; everything gets more and more hijacked to closed gardens so I feel more of us should go the extra mile and find out how open-source things work.
Just not sure when will I be financially secure enough for it.
Thank you, I am definitely writing down everything written in the thread. I will get to tinkering at some point.
Most ARM boards have lacking software support and run vendor supplied patched distributions or kernels that are out of date (or at least will be after a short period of lagging updates).
If you wanted to run a robust and patched up ARM Linux distribution for networked use, you usually want timely security patches, and this requirement narrows down the options a lot.
Even the best board-specific distros (like Raspbian) lag in the security updates dept so for many uses you want to look at which boards are officially supported by mainstream distros.
Thank you for the down-to-earth advice. It helps a lot.
I realize I can search for that myself but in any case, which machines work well with the more conservative distros -- like Slackware and some of the BSDs?
Raspbian actually has more of a problem with security updates than some of the competing distros, because the original Raspberry Pi and the Zero use an obsolete ARM sub-architecture that none of the major upstream distros support, so they have to recompile every single package. If you use a board supported by the Debian flavour of Armbian for instance, that gets security updates for everything but the kernel and bootloader direct from the Debian stable repositories.
It's true that many board vendors use out-of-date kernels and rarely update their software. But community editions like [Armbian](https://www.armbian.com) are usually kept fully up to date.
I've been using multiple ARM-based SBCs as desktop computers over a year now and have really been impressed with how software support has improved. It used to be only older versions of Firefox would run. Now most boards that use Ubuntu 18.04 (which include most versions of Armbian) will run Firefox 62.
I'm really happy with an HP MicroServer, it does have a fan but is using a low power CPU so doesn't run hot. None of the cheap ARM systems can take ECC RAM.
Same here. I never understood, why people would opt for an embedded ARM board if other, more attractive options, were available. No ECC and USB<->SATA bridges rule out any serious NAS/server use.
>> "I've been meaning to do it" for like 2 years now.
If this is the case, I'd suggest you get an appliance instead.
ASUSTOR (and others) make NASes with Intel processors and upgradeable RAM. In addition to having a wide selection of apps/servers, they can do Docker and VirtualBox and can be up and running in a matter of minutes.
I don't mind the drives much but the constant stronger fan noise from CPU / GPU / motherboard can really tick me off.
For my NAS I would bet that I would have to put it in a storage room, yep. Especially having in mind I would want to expand it with further drives in the future.
I started looking into this category of HW - SBCs, that is - 4 years ago. Initially, it was mostly curiosity ; to see whether I could apply my UNIX knowledge on these tiny machines, and whether I could coax them into doing actually useful things.
The result: I am addicted :-)
Not in the sense of idiotic consumerism - no, I only bought two of them (a Raspberry PI 2 and an Orange PI Zero). But in the sense of realizing that they can be put to many, many uses - and perform this work utilizing only a fraction of the energy cost of even the best of x86 designs.
I wrote a detailed blog post [1] about what I did with my 11 Euro (not a typo) Orange PI Zero. After that, I set it up as my NFS and Borgbackup server (i.e. I attached my two external portable USB drives on it - and it has multiple USB root-level hubs, so it gives me decent speed on them). A complete backup of my Arch Linux laptop (250GB SSD, MB Air from 2012) takes around 6 minutes to complete over Wi-Fi - and due to the magic of Borgbackup's deduplication, I have about 150 such complete "images" in a bit over 300GB total storage on the two drives. A periodic "scrub" run once a week makes sure there's no bit-rot - and if there is, the btrfs mirror over the two drives corrects it.
As for my Raspberry PI2...
- setup as an `sslh` gateway; this means that I can use `sshuttle` from the outside world to create on-the-spot SSH-based "VPN"s and access places that are blocked (during travels, work, etc). It basically "transports" my laptop/work computer into my home LAN.
- At the same time it is serving up my collected notes over the years on a Let's Encrypt-ed HTTPS private site via NGINX.
- FreeDNS provides a nice, easily accessible name for both these services.
- An attached RPI camera is used to take a picture every 5 seconds - and if the picture is sufficiently different from the previous one, it encrypts it and uploads it to my Digital Ocean droplet. Whatever happens to my apartment while I'm gone, I get a record of it on a remote server that only I can decode (the remote server doesn't have the GPG key necessary to do so, I have those on me).
- The SPI functionality of the PI is also used in my various micro-controller experiments - e.g. to "flash" my ATMEGA328p and have it do silly things [2].
- In general, I am tinkering with electronics - and there's a lot of fun in doing this with SBCs.
- At some point, I had it run exim4 as well; and got my mail-tester.com score up to 10/10.
The PI2 was 35Euros - the Orange PI zero 11 Euros.
The fun I've had building the stuff above? Learning skills? Connecting to them over serial ports and reliving my Uni-days?
I wonder, why, in today's world, people still use these for Firewall and NAS purposes.
Both Mikrotik and Ubiquity offer low-cost systems under 100€, that have been purposed for FW+Routing and come with very capable firmwares, 4 network ports and, at least I know this about Ubiquity, specialized CPUs with hardware encryption.
The NAS systems many vendors offer, use the same ARM CPUs for the low cost solutions, but offer more performance for a little bit of extra money, and then, sometimes, allow for ECC and real SATA, instead of these USB<->SATA bridges.
If you want to tinker, you always can, because: it's a computer.
I got a Ubiquity EdgeRouter-Lite as hardware firewall. It comes with:
* 3 Gb Ethernet ports
* 1 console port
* fanless
* EdgeOS, which is a (superb) Vyatta (Debian) clone
* total cost, including PSU and nice metal casing: 90€
As for NAS, and backup in my parent's home I installed a WD MyCloud with 4TB, wiped off the firmware and installed a custom solution, that is available on the WD forums (OpenMediaVault).
Price: approx. 155€, including PSU and nice casing. 10€ more, than the hard disk, that is inside, cost retail, back then. RAM could be a bit more, but this is for my parents, so the only one missing the RAM is me, when I am on vacation.
At home I use two HP MicroServers. A 36NL and its update, I think it's named 40NL.
* AMD CPU
* 4x (real) SATA + 1 aux. SATA (I think it could do RAID, but I use ZFS anyway)
* 16 GB ECC RAM
* 1x Gb Ethernet
* 1x remote control administration card (can switch on and boot, enter the BIOS, install OS via network)
* place for a single 5.25" (I mounted a hard disk swap frame here, that is compatible with my external USB slide in HDD case)
* beautiful case with 4 hard disk swap frames (no hotswap)
* 160W PSU
* not fanless :-(
* Hewlett Packard entry level server, semi-pro
This system cost, including a wimpy 1TB HDD and 1GB RAM, 160€. I run SmartOS on my main server, and am going to install UnRAID or similar, on the elder one, that I am going to use for backup.
As for other appliances: in the kitchen I use a Logitech internet radio, as media clients I use an Android tablet and an NVidia Shield console (USB audio out to external DAC!). Again, no need to do any tinkering above the average level.
This is exactly the thing with appliances: They are domain specific, specialized purpose utilities! That's why you want hardware, that has been specialized, just as your firmware/OS has been specialized (OMV, FreeNAS, pfSense, etc.)
I would never want to have a server without IPMI (remote control) again!
And, since you can get good offers for these devices on the retail market, you can pay less, that for a full SBC setup, which will need a case and a PSU in addition, and which gets sold with an additional retail margin (yes, I know, packages exist).
I'm curious, why have you gone with SmartOS. I have tinkered with FreeNAS, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Alpine and even briefly Hyper-V server on my Gen 8 Microserver though I'm now running NixOS. What does SmartOS give you that FreeBSD or a Linux distro doesn't?
Back then, if you wanted to use a stable ZFS in production, OpenSolaris derivatives (Illumos, SmartOS, OmniOS) seemed the best choice. And amongst these choices, SmartOS, which basically is a sort of Hypervisor (it just boots into a simple, bare OS from USB stick, then you provision your virtual hosts), was the most matching for a server task. That was even before OmniOS existed.
Also, back then, there were no containers, or they were just in their early phase. Solaris had "Zones". Since this is a home-server, I wanted to run different virtual servers on one machine in my living room. Perfect match.
And while Linux has caught up in many regards, I still find it attractive, that so many features are part of the original design, rather than stuff put on top of it, aftermarket. It's just a much more cleaner experience.
74 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 80.8 ms ] threadToo bad the price will be over $100 though, not including a DDR4 SODIMM, but that’s the price of Intel. Great to see a well-known boardmaker coming out with an up-to-date x86 option.
now it's the same price of any itx board. with the same high power profile.
for the last 4 years anyone could spend $40 on a itx board with 12v power input, plus $40 for a fully featured ia64 AMD5350 APU, and have exactly what you describe for 35W (or 55 under load)
I wouldn't normally comment on something like this, but I noticed this mistake twice in the linked post as well. ia64 refers to Itanium, while amd64/x86-64/x64 refer to the 64-bit version of x86.
Now, in the x86 space both of those things (software support, reliability) are not an issue. Besides, there are much cheaper options available on the market (e.g. https://s.click.aliexpress.com/e/cSJOvljS , same platform with 4GB ddr4, 64gb emmc, case, power supply for ~$140 shipping included).
So I reckon you're right, this product won't be too successful.
I've never had realtek network hardware that wasn't unstable under load on linux.
I still prefer Intel NICs, but IIRC, Realtek works just fine now. The new network antichrist is "Killer" WiFi NICs
For me they have been rock-solid using Debian for many years across different generations of Realtek NICs.
On the other hand I have experienced no end of issues with Intel 82574L, e.g. http://blog.krisk.org/2013/02/packets-of-death.html and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1730550
Please note that opnsense also exists. It does most (all?) of what pfsense can do but has a much saner organisation and team behind it that doesn't resort to character assassination to promote their product.
I'll spare you the drama but if you care at all, look it up and choose opnsense rather than pfsense.
Pretty awesome board:
- Intel J4105 (2.3Ghz Quad-core, fanless!)
- Up to 32GB DDR4
- M.2 SSD (4 x PCIe 2.0)
- 2 x GbE
- 2 x SATA 3.0
- HDMI 2.0 and DP 1.2 at 4k
- 2xUART, 2xI2C - both at 3.3V
- 110x110x43mm
- Expected to ship in late November, price will be above $100
https://www.lattepanda.com/
WHRRRRYYYYYYYYY??????? Realtek in linux is an irreperable shitshow. All my interest evaporated right at that point.
Mostly those cheap 300€ HP 15" Laptops.
Now if they had said "Realtek is a shitshow (but hey, it's cheap!)" I would agree :-)
https://m.aliexpress.com/wholesale/N3150.html
That chip feels very slow (favorite in budget laptops thanks to Intel pricing, what a travesty)
J4105 has way better benchmarks: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Celeron-N3150-vs...
Maybe I missed it, but were there perf/usd metrics? Less USD makes it nicer :D
As long as you're not adding any unnecessary additional load to it, I don't see why it wouldn't last even longer than a decade.
model A: 3 NICs, no audio, no video, no SATA, aimed at firewalls with DMZ
model B: 1 or 2 NICs, again no audio and no video though a minimum of 2 to 4 SATA ports to be used as NAS/server machines w/software RAID etc.
model C: more powerful CPU, just 1 NIC, audio, video and 1 SATA port to be used as a client/MPC etc.
Would the higher cost of producing 3 specialized boards exceed the benefits of making general purpose ones where for example a powerful and costly GPU is left unused because the user had no alternatives to consider for building his file server? I for one would seriously consider purchasing the first two (as I did with other pcengines.ch firewall boards in the past).
And for that matter I don't think Intel offers any low-power chips without a built-in graphics accelerator.
And the entire ecosystem has stagnated in terms of performance and improvements so there is no excitement for the future.
Starting a few years ago you could get a Apollo lake NUC for $120 and it would solve all the driver and software issues faced in the arm ecosystem and once you do that you begin to lose interest in all the arm boards because with x86 everything is compatible out of the box. And this seems to be the path Odroid has taken.
I am very interested in making a home NAS, a Pi-Hole, an OpenVPN server and possibly a VM host -- what are my options if I want a few servers in my bedroom with zero fan noise (even during the summer when the room temperature can be at 35-40 Celsius)? Or should I just sacrifice one floor of shelf space in my small storage room and make sure the machines have good fan cooling?
I've been meaning to inform myself on the subject but real life and job changes have been very annoying and I was recently shocked by the memory that "I've been meaning to do it" for like 2 years now.
So can somebody give a layman a few pros and cons of our options?
(I will definitely use Ethernet on all my home servers. Not interested in how good -- or existent -- their WiFi adapters are. It would even be a bonus for me if I can physically turn off the WiFi on them.)
A good way to start is to follow a few subreddits, like r/datahoarder or r/homelab to get some inspiration and understand what are the options etc.
But since you still need an answer, here is something to get you started: 1) For fanless and ease of setup, buy a Synology/QNAP NAS, and install additional software there - $300+ w/o disks. 2) For future proof, buy Dell T30 on eBay for $300 and install FreeNAS on it.
...Is there any other option than Linux for a server OS? Like, practically? I know there are a bunch of others but speaking about everyday classic needs... is there really a choice?
Budget -- I never did mind paying $1000 instead of $150 but it has to be worth it. I don't want to sheepishly buy the latest and greatest, especially after seeing many times in my programming career how a very modest machine (when properly tuned) can be a very decent server that can last you all the way until you need rented dedicated servers in several data centers.
(Example: I gave up on the idea of an OpenVPN server on an RPi 3 after making a research on the expected bandwidth. It would be too small.)
Thanks for the recommendations! Writing them down (not joking).
- low power or performance? - ease of use vs. tunability? - closed vs. open-source?
For the server OS, your choices are practically either Linux or FreeBSD (FreeNAS is based on the latter). If you don’t need zfs for NAS, OpenBSD becomes another interesting option - assuming the hardware is supported, is rock solid and easy to administrate, but may have some learning curve.
Tinkering with something like RaspberryPi is not a bad idea - you will spend $50 or so but will learn a ton and in the process will understand your own requirements better. However, if you want NAS, I recommend buying a server-class hardware (like T30 mentioned above) and invest time in understanding how to use zfs and do reliable backups, assuming your data is valueable. I personally don’t think you should aim for lower power for NAS with any serious amount of data.
I am not opposed to it; everything gets more and more hijacked to closed gardens so I feel more of us should go the extra mile and find out how open-source things work.
Just not sure when will I be financially secure enough for it.
Thank you, I am definitely writing down everything written in the thread. I will get to tinkering at some point.
Most ARM boards have lacking software support and run vendor supplied patched distributions or kernels that are out of date (or at least will be after a short period of lagging updates).
If you wanted to run a robust and patched up ARM Linux distribution for networked use, you usually want timely security patches, and this requirement narrows down the options a lot.
Even the best board-specific distros (like Raspbian) lag in the security updates dept so for many uses you want to look at which boards are officially supported by mainstream distros.
Thank you for the down-to-earth advice. It helps a lot.
I realize I can search for that myself but in any case, which machines work well with the more conservative distros -- like Slackware and some of the BSDs?
I've been using multiple ARM-based SBCs as desktop computers over a year now and have really been impressed with how software support has improved. It used to be only older versions of Firefox would run. Now most boards that use Ubuntu 18.04 (which include most versions of Armbian) will run Firefox 62.
If this is the case, I'd suggest you get an appliance instead.
ASUSTOR (and others) make NASes with Intel processors and upgradeable RAM. In addition to having a wide selection of apps/servers, they can do Docker and VirtualBox and can be up and running in a matter of minutes.
Thanks!
I'm not sure you can avoid size when you're dealing with multiple NAS appropriate drives, i.e. those in the 3.5" form factor.
My 2 drive unit is about the size of a small toaster.
For my NAS I would bet that I would have to put it in a storage room, yep. Especially having in mind I would want to expand it with further drives in the future.
I started looking into this category of HW - SBCs, that is - 4 years ago. Initially, it was mostly curiosity ; to see whether I could apply my UNIX knowledge on these tiny machines, and whether I could coax them into doing actually useful things.
The result: I am addicted :-)
Not in the sense of idiotic consumerism - no, I only bought two of them (a Raspberry PI 2 and an Orange PI Zero). But in the sense of realizing that they can be put to many, many uses - and perform this work utilizing only a fraction of the energy cost of even the best of x86 designs.
I wrote a detailed blog post [1] about what I did with my 11 Euro (not a typo) Orange PI Zero. After that, I set it up as my NFS and Borgbackup server (i.e. I attached my two external portable USB drives on it - and it has multiple USB root-level hubs, so it gives me decent speed on them). A complete backup of my Arch Linux laptop (250GB SSD, MB Air from 2012) takes around 6 minutes to complete over Wi-Fi - and due to the magic of Borgbackup's deduplication, I have about 150 such complete "images" in a bit over 300GB total storage on the two drives. A periodic "scrub" run once a week makes sure there's no bit-rot - and if there is, the btrfs mirror over the two drives corrects it.
As for my Raspberry PI2...
- setup as an `sslh` gateway; this means that I can use `sshuttle` from the outside world to create on-the-spot SSH-based "VPN"s and access places that are blocked (during travels, work, etc). It basically "transports" my laptop/work computer into my home LAN.
- At the same time it is serving up my collected notes over the years on a Let's Encrypt-ed HTTPS private site via NGINX.
- FreeDNS provides a nice, easily accessible name for both these services.
- An attached RPI camera is used to take a picture every 5 seconds - and if the picture is sufficiently different from the previous one, it encrypts it and uploads it to my Digital Ocean droplet. Whatever happens to my apartment while I'm gone, I get a record of it on a remote server that only I can decode (the remote server doesn't have the GPG key necessary to do so, I have those on me).
- The SPI functionality of the PI is also used in my various micro-controller experiments - e.g. to "flash" my ATMEGA328p and have it do silly things [2].
- In general, I am tinkering with electronics - and there's a lot of fun in doing this with SBCs.
- At some point, I had it run exim4 as well; and got my mail-tester.com score up to 10/10.
The PI2 was 35Euros - the Orange PI zero 11 Euros.
The fun I've had building the stuff above? Learning skills? Connecting to them over serial ports and reliving my Uni-days?
Priceless :-)
[1] https://www.thanassis.space/thebeast.html#thebeast
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsqmnkfZtSw
I always wanted to do stuff like that, never had the energy or the peaceful times to do... ever since I was like 19.
Mind if I contact you in the future about any of these projects? I would very much like to try most of the things from your list!
Both Mikrotik and Ubiquity offer low-cost systems under 100€, that have been purposed for FW+Routing and come with very capable firmwares, 4 network ports and, at least I know this about Ubiquity, specialized CPUs with hardware encryption.
The NAS systems many vendors offer, use the same ARM CPUs for the low cost solutions, but offer more performance for a little bit of extra money, and then, sometimes, allow for ECC and real SATA, instead of these USB<->SATA bridges.
If you want to tinker, you always can, because: it's a computer.
I got a Ubiquity EdgeRouter-Lite as hardware firewall. It comes with:
* 3 Gb Ethernet ports
* 1 console port
* fanless
* EdgeOS, which is a (superb) Vyatta (Debian) clone
* total cost, including PSU and nice metal casing: 90€
As for NAS, and backup in my parent's home I installed a WD MyCloud with 4TB, wiped off the firmware and installed a custom solution, that is available on the WD forums (OpenMediaVault).
Price: approx. 155€, including PSU and nice casing. 10€ more, than the hard disk, that is inside, cost retail, back then. RAM could be a bit more, but this is for my parents, so the only one missing the RAM is me, when I am on vacation.
At home I use two HP MicroServers. A 36NL and its update, I think it's named 40NL.
* AMD CPU
* 4x (real) SATA + 1 aux. SATA (I think it could do RAID, but I use ZFS anyway)
* 16 GB ECC RAM
* 1x Gb Ethernet
* 1x remote control administration card (can switch on and boot, enter the BIOS, install OS via network)
* place for a single 5.25" (I mounted a hard disk swap frame here, that is compatible with my external USB slide in HDD case)
* beautiful case with 4 hard disk swap frames (no hotswap)
* 160W PSU
* not fanless :-(
* Hewlett Packard entry level server, semi-pro
This system cost, including a wimpy 1TB HDD and 1GB RAM, 160€. I run SmartOS on my main server, and am going to install UnRAID or similar, on the elder one, that I am going to use for backup.
As for other appliances: in the kitchen I use a Logitech internet radio, as media clients I use an Android tablet and an NVidia Shield console (USB audio out to external DAC!). Again, no need to do any tinkering above the average level.
This is exactly the thing with appliances: They are domain specific, specialized purpose utilities! That's why you want hardware, that has been specialized, just as your firmware/OS has been specialized (OMV, FreeNAS, pfSense, etc.)
I would never want to have a server without IPMI (remote control) again!
And, since you can get good offers for these devices on the retail market, you can pay less, that for a full SBC setup, which will need a case and a PSU in addition, and which gets sold with an additional retail margin (yes, I know, packages exist).
Back then, if you wanted to use a stable ZFS in production, OpenSolaris derivatives (Illumos, SmartOS, OmniOS) seemed the best choice. And amongst these choices, SmartOS, which basically is a sort of Hypervisor (it just boots into a simple, bare OS from USB stick, then you provision your virtual hosts), was the most matching for a server task. That was even before OmniOS existed.
Also, back then, there were no containers, or they were just in their early phase. Solaris had "Zones". Since this is a home-server, I wanted to run different virtual servers on one machine in my living room. Perfect match.
And while Linux has caught up in many regards, I still find it attractive, that so many features are part of the original design, rather than stuff put on top of it, aftermarket. It's just a much more cleaner experience.
https://dn.odroid.com/