This Topton-brand mini-ITX motherboard on AliExpress seems like a pretty decent choice for an Opnsense/Pfsense-based home router setup. It has four Intel 2.5gbe ports, an integrated 10W TDP CPU, and way more storage options than necessary for my use case.
However, I’m leery of just about everything from AliExpress. In this case, I assume security is probably a distant consideration after function and price point.
Am I being overly paranoid? Are products like this riddled with back doors and other exploitable components? Has anyone else out there built a router using this board?
I bought that tiger lake motherboard with the laptop i7 on an ITX motherboard and the bios sucks. They left a lot of debug settings, there are a lot of options. Like 4 pages of settings that only make sense for the engineers who developed this. It’s not stable, sometimes doesn’t wake up from sleep, sometimes it hangs.
From now on I will only buy motherboards from reputable OEMs and not unknown ones operating from a 15 square meters room in Shenzhen with no extensive testing or future support
It’s not stable, sometimes doesn’t wake up from sleep, sometimes it hangs.
That’s too bad. On paper, these boards seem to check all the boxes. It seems like the reality is that they lack quality-of-life features like general reliability. Probably not a great quality in router hardware…
I bought one of those passively cooled router boxes from AliExpress and have been running opnsense for over a year on it now. It’s way overkill for router + ad blocking, but it’s been working great.
Why buy a mobo when you could get this for cheaper, in a smaller footprint, and comes with a case and PSU? Do you really need the SATA ports?
I definitely don’t need the SATA ports. I have a vision of putting this board in a 1u chassis. I’m sure AliExpress also has a 1u version of this hardware…
I bought the N100 version of what I linked above and it’s been great so far. Obviously you have your own requirements, but IMO this is a waste of a U. The system is so compact that you’re better off putting it on a shelf with other things.
More powerful N100, smaller, cheaper, no brainer to me.
Nah, I worked on router firmware, we rarely have time to finish the requirements, but I would worry if it was someone like tenda.
Put your own distro on it and be happy, intel has more root ware on that than anyone.
Have a look at the Fujitsu Futro S720/920. They are dirty cheap on eBay (from 20/30€) and you can add a PCI Ethernet card (single/dual/quad gigabit, but I’m sure there are even 2.5/10 Gbps) and you’ll have your router ready with less than 100€!
Good tip. I’ve definitely looked at the Fujitsu boxes. However, I’m located in the US, and Fujitsu never sold those in the States, so they’re hard to find. The shipping fees from the EU seem to be in the $50-$90 range, which eliminates any cost savings.
Oh, I didn’t know. Have a look at the HP T730 or some other HP thin client.