New hardware for home build

[LaurentR]

I own both Qotom and Yanling (OEM of the Protectli units).

At equal config, Qotom is a bit cheaper and totally adequate. I recommend buying from Aliexpress, which is cheaper than buying from Amazon (and not slower).

I have looked at their offering a lot and would recommend the Q355G4 (i5-5200U, 4 GbE NICs) as the best !/$. It is capable of dealing with home Gb connection with everything turned on.

Add 4GB of DRAM and a small SSD and you're good to go.

The Q355G4 is $225 naked (no DRAM, no SSD) shipped to the US by DHL.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000...74cb3657KtqhI3

I personally love the small fanless units. They are fast, silent, small and energy efficient, so they fit my needs. I don't have a telco closet with space for a noisy, rackmount Dell server (very popular among the software firewall crowd).

All my other networking gear is small and silent. So is my firewall appliance. And compared to the total cost of networking equipment (switches/AP), dropping $200 on a fanless PC seems reasonable.

[manilx]

Just yesterday switched from running UT on a ZOTAC ZBOX CI547 to now a Protectli FW6C.

Moving was not that easy as before as the import of the settings created some issues with networking hw and settings related to that. Took me a few hours longer than expected but running fine.