I accidentally cooked my current Opnsense router last night trying to shoehorn an M.2 2.5g nic into it. So I’m looking for recommendations for something new.
The now dead machine is an i5 Lenovo M920q with a Connect-x3 10g card and a USB3 2.5g nic.
I have 2 gig fiber service that’s handed off on an RJ45 2.5g port. So I feel like that really limits my options.
Edit
After much research I came up with a couple different barebone options.
R86s (N100 and N305) H7-a (Pentium 8505) Cwwk (N100)
Ultimately the H7-a won as I could reuse the RAM and SSD out of my dead machine and it should be here decently quickly. I also found a 2.5gbe SFP for my switch so the lack of 10 gig wasn’t a complete deal breaker.
The R86s would have been the perfect replacement, but I’m too impatient to wait on it to get here and it was on the expensive side.
It doesn’t really take all that much to run 2Gb speeds if you’re not doing much with the traffic - any modernish processor in a small fanless box would work with 4-8GB ram. If you’re wanting to run Suricata, VPN, etc then you need more.
If you didn’t need 2.5 Gbps on the network, ace magician has a ryzen 5 mini that has a 2.5 Gbps and a 1 Gbps NIC for around 300 USD. Otherwise I guess you are looking for a new pc to put in fast cards.
