this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
17 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

40180 readers
1445 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

top 5 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Moonrise2473@feddit.it 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] aseriesoftubes@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

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…

[–] modesto_hagney@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] foggenbooty@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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?

https://a.aliexpress.com/_mtmaWfo

[–] InvertedParallax@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

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.