Time is merely a perspective. I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

Perhaps it is overblown, but one of the reasons I have 8 drives is because I wanted to run raidz2 for the extra redundancy. I’ve had multiple drives die before and so as disk sizes have gone up more redundancy has been important (at least I thought so).

So when my first ZFS NAS (4 disks) developed hardware failure, I decided to get more serious about it. Hence larger rack device with a proper Xeon with ECC memory and an HBA for 8 disks + 2 SSDs and the old drives that survived as a play space. I’ve also used this server now for 9 years.

Node 304

That is a really nice small form factor case. I was recently looking at Fractal’s Define 7 XL because it can hold an amazing 18 3.5" + SSDs.

Because of their contractor status they may not have any grounds to do so. Looks real shitty though for sure.

Exactly what I said

100% fresh

Considering what Google did to the jabber protocol, we can all be glad they gave up, IMO.

Have had the TP Link Deco units installed for a few days now.

They are pretty good. I’m basically able to suck up the entire bandwidth of my 500/500 fiber line directly over the wifi.

On top of that, the mesh support has been good, connecting me to the best node and passing mobile devices between nodes well.

They also have two modes BTW - normal gateway mode and just AP mode - for those who want to park them behind a pfsense router.

The janky things about them are their setup encourages you to setup via their app with an account, which many here will find at best distasteful.

Its better we stop depending on the single points of failure anyway. The psychopaths will always do whatever they want in the name of the shareholder - even when its not true.

Yeah the n5105 looks like a nice little processor. I also liked that those boards come with the i226-V 2.5GbE controller.

For myself, I really wanted wifi 6e and something able to mesh (for the happy wife factor) so I recently purchased the TP Link Deco. It should arrive in a week or so.

Personally, I would have preferred to setup OpenWRT for a nice mesh but for some reason there are no Wifi 6 ones yet let alone 6e.

Thank you @coffelov for your timely post - I was going to post a very similar question myself today. What sort of hardware are you considering to use for your pfsense server?

There are a lot of possible solutions that could be suitable, wondering what sort of hardware you were thinking about.

Something like 12 years I used Reddit, but they really nailed the coffin lid shut now.