I run a N100 for my router/firewall/OPNSense that's fanless and another cheaper N100 that has a fan for everything else. The N100 is a just great all around, relatively lower power consumption, fast and can handle everything I need. The benefit of this is that everything just works. No playing with drivers, or special built distros, it just works. The power draw for my fanless is around 15W but I have 4 Intels 2.5G NICs. My fanned one takes about 10W on average.
I was looking at something like this for my router needs, and I'm currently running OPNSense (but I'd be OK with switching to Linux). I've read many comments about these being wonky, on HN and other forums. What's your experience with them, especially under high load?
I run a fanless CWWK one with OPNSense and it’s been rock solid. I have i-226 and I got pretty lucky because it got added to support a couple weeks before I tried it (I probably should have checked but I naively assumed it would worked since the i-225 works). I’ve been running for almost 8 months? And I haven’t touched it besides running an update for OPNsense and NGFW. I use an omada AP and I get around 800 Mbps internet on hardwire and 4-500 on wifi 6. I have like one device for 6E so I kept that feature off to save some electricity. I also only have one 2.5G Ethernet device so I never got to test the iperf for it. But with about 30ish devices on the network, I use at most 30% cpu and 12GB of RAM but most of it is the ZFS cache. I think OPNsense with NGFW is about 6GB)
I have a CWWK one [1] but I bought mine from aliexpress since it has a better “guarantee”. I keep mine in my garage so the CPU temperature gets uncomfortably high (above 70C) when the garage is 80F+ during the summer so I put an AC infinity fan on top that takes like 2W. This keeps it cool for the whole summer. Haven’t had any issues since I have gotten it. They recently released a newer 6 NiC but haven’t used it.
