I’m going to be adding an OPNSense transparent filtering bridge to my home network and I really like the idea of a separate management port to ensure admin access. Do to the continuing tariff war it is not likely that I can get a Gowin P or G series router/firewall device at a price similar to past pricing. After a bit of searching I did find a “possibly” better device selling under the UDPTCP brand. The unit has an Intel Alder Lake N305 8C/8T, three 2.5Gb ethernet ports and two 10Gb SFP+ ports that I could use if I update my network to something faster. I can get it with no NVMe M.2 SSD and no RAM as I have extra of both from an older project.
Has anyone heard of UDPTCP? I can’t find very much online and I’d like to know if there is anyone in this forum with any experience with this brand.
I have seen that brand but don’t have experience with it. Sometimes you can have good experiences with various Chinese brands.
My first OPNsense box was a Qotom (wasn’t many options back in 2017) and I used it for 5-6 years 24/7. I stopped using it when I upgraded to a more powerful mini PC. I didn’t use it for a few years but recently I repurposed it as a secondary Proxmox Backup Server and it’s still running great for that simple purpose.
I run many of my energy efficent devices 24/7 and on a UPS so I feel like that helps increase longevity of devices. Most of the time I replace hardware due to wanting more performance than because of hardware failures.
I was about to buy that UDPTCP but they sold out. The prices of everything from China have skyrocketed. I’m now looking at a used Dell PowerEdge, possibly an R740. I’m looking to see if I can get used RAM sticks for it. A lot of RAM manufacturers are doing “end of life” on DDR3 and some DDR4 / DDR5. Not a good time to invest in hardware.