Originally Posted by StevieC
Originally Posted by pitzel
Nice.. Only big downside is that its probably costing you 25W.
I'm basically in the process of building the same setup using a cheap industrial fanless 4th gen CPU PC that I bought last year and have sitting on the shelf. With an i5-4570T (have to use the "T" version in my particular implementation).
Ever considered using your extra Ethernet ports to increase redundancy?
What else can I suggest.... Maybe set up a tftp server so you can serve up PXE boot menus and images for client PCs? The way I have my system set up here is that I can bring anyone's PC/laptop, plug it in, enable PXE boot, and voila, it will load up a menu that I can select from any one of a number of PXE bootable utilities. Or even iSCSI targets if you install ipxe.
edit: this is what I'm using:
http://www.nexcom.com/Products/mult...ce-player/1080p-signage-player-ndis-b533 . And I have 2 compatible WiFi cards I'm adding to it as well, so it will also serve as an access point for 2.4GHz/5GHz 802.11n
It has boot support built in as well as TFTP, although I don't have a need for that at this time.
Also supports SSH for the console so no hardware is needed where it is.
As for the wattage... Doesn't bother me. I'm gas for everything possible here so it's made up for. LOL
I hadn't given thought for redundancy because I don't see it being an issue and being mission critical and didn't want to add complexity if not necessary. It's a good idea though.
I went with the Ubiquity access point because of the Faraday cage my house seems to be with the metal mesh in the plaster walls. It was the only thing I tested that seemed to cover the entire house and outdoor areas placed in one central location of my house. I tested a bunch of things and nothing seemed to be as good as it was in this setup.
Thanks for the info you provided. Great discussion points.
Regarding the point of link redundancy, i can't really see there being any on a NIC that shares a common backplane. If one port fails on that bad boy, odds are the whole card is garbage. What you could leverage is link aggregation/teaming, but you have no need for, or means to leverage, that level of throughput, so it's really a non-starter. When I do fail overs, they are always utilizing completely separate hardware. If you had a 2nd one of those cards, then you could do redundancy or, you could use the on-board lan-port for that purpose I suppose
Realistically, since we aren't dealing with enterprise-grade gear here or a mission-critical application, the power supply in that computer or the motherboard are likely to give out before the NIC does. The redundancy thing would be more of a learning exercise than one of practicality IMHO.