I used pFSense for years until Netgate took over. That is when I switched to OPNSense (maybe 2019/2020, don’t remember excatly). Since then, I’ve had OPNSense (runnign on a Lenovo m720q tiny) and Unifi (APs and UNVR) for wireless and cameras. I like this setup, it gives me all the advanced routing features I want and have become accustomed. I’m sure Unifi routers are good for most use cases and would have the added convenience of one interface for everything. However, I’ve not been impressed with price to performance ratios for their past offerings (ie. the routing capabilities of OPNsense with an i5 CPU and option for swapping a quad port 1gbe nic to a dual port 10gbe nic) is hard to compete against. That said, the UDM-SE looks interesting.

Ubiquity has always felt a bit shoddy and hacked together. Reminds me of the bad USB sticks in the NVR or the shitty G4 doorbells that would die after 18-24 months from a bad converter board.

Lol, I ran a very simple pfsense box on a R710 for years. The most expensive router I’ve ever had (due to power costs).

That’s exactly something a guilty party would say, lol.

Prepare thine cochlear senses, oh noble audiophiles, for I’ve stumbled upon a sonorous marvel that’ll make your eardrums jitterbug like caffeinated squirrels at a techno rave. Upon placing these auditory gems upon your cranium, it’s as if you’re spelunking through the caverns of sound, where the bass is so profound that it feels like a cosmic beluga whale serenading a black hole.

Yep, I have a 3000va unit in my main basement rack. I had to run a 30A circuit for it.

The cheapest solution, assuming you have a drill, a small jab saw, a measuring tape, an optional stud finder, and some sort of fishing line, is to run it in the wall. Then the only cost is the Ethernet cable, which is super cheap in bulk. You could do finished keystone jacks on both ends to make it look nice, but they aren’t necessary.

Next to that the next cheapest is probably an old wifi router or AP to pipe the Ethernet from the poweredge into and then a wifi card in your computer.

Power line adapters are also an option.

Wow, that’s cool. Is that an Intel based nic, driver support is good?

The m700 is a fine box, but doesn’t have the PCIe slot for an add in nic. This would limit it’s utility as a router box. Even a m720q with a pentium would work well as a router box.

A Lenovo m720q with a PCIe riser for your NIC. Try to get on with the 8th gen i5. These typically go for ~$100USD on hardwareswap, and a bit more in ebay.

This is great!

I run SnapRAID on top of Drivepool on a windows machine. You could use SnapRAID with something like mergerfs on Linux if you wanted. I have two pools (10 data, 3 parity) and a (3 data, 1 parity). With snapraid I run pool syncs nightly and scrub (~3% nightly to cover the entire array monthly).I tried unRAID first and liked it, but there were some issues with my LSI controller resulting in poor write speed, I was never able to figure it out. I’ve been running the Drivepoo/SnapRAID combination now for ~6 years or so. I’ve had to rebuild two drives from parity in that time and it was painless (a config file edit and two commands).

If you do this make sure you have a good backup solution in place. Don’t be like me running a nextcloud instance on a single disk server and when the disk died I lost everything. I’ve since moved to a parity based backup solution.