Closetbox2
As an alternative look on the closetbox proposed by Chotee, and sharing many similarities especially in regards to services and software, I went with a slightly different approach, more aimed at power users/hackers than something you could give to your aunt/nephew to install in their closets.
My set of requirements is different / more demanding:
- Can use two DSL/Cable lines parallel, not using channel bundling but as a means to limit downtime by redundancy, and preserve low latency despite high traffic.
- Must offer a DMZ or other means to isolate services, a sandbox that limits exposure of the LAN section should some 'private cloud' service be exploited.
Using ARM devices proved a little difficult since I could not find any/many with two NIC's, let alone more. A router like Carambola2 with OpenWRT offers two NICs plus wifi. This had my interest until I found a low-power dual core x86 board with 3x Gbit LAN for 155 euros: PC Engines ALIX.APU1C:
- Compatible with x86
- 1GHz AMD SBC with 2 cores
- 2 GB RAM
- SATA, mSATA, SDcard
- Gigabit LAN x3
- Mini PCIe Slots, Console port, GPIO pins
- Virtualisation extensions, so can run Virtualbox etc.
- Power consumption still only 6-12 watts
This offers so much possibilities that I immediately ordered it. You can opt for running fully sandboxed machines as VMs, but also by adding small RasPi/Beaglebone-type machines to the DMZ NIC port. You have full flexibility. You have full I/O speed with this, unlike RasPi systems, and it is fully prepared for the future with gigabit.
There are still some issues to be solved for my use case; like how to obtain the required fourth NIC. This can be done with a USB-based NIC, or by using VLAN. The questions of which OS, which VM platform, adding many additional SBC's or not. In the coming period I hope to find suitable solutions to these questions. I will also need to install all these new private cloud solutions I'm unfamiliar with, and I look forward to work together with the Closetbox crew to tackle such issues.
