Over the last 20 years I’ve used each revision of the PC Engines hardware for all my headless firewall and network appliance needs, both at home and professionally.
I have never had a single one die, even if the occasional flash storage kicks the bucket.
They were inexpensive, reliable, customizable, flexible and a joy to use with pretty well any Linux or BSD you’d like.
I’m very sad I won’t be able to look forward to a future revision for my next hardware refresh.
On the other hand every raspberry pi I’ve played with has died within 6mo to a year, and while most Linuxy things worked great, I found there were some invisible walls you hit when you tried to get too far outside the predetermined ecosystem (things controlled by firmware blobs) and the inability to run x86 code was more annoying than I was expecting.
What other tiny, multi-nic, expandable, x64 based, inexpensive, reliable headless solutions are out there to fill the void?
I have never had a single one die, even if the occasional flash storage kicks the bucket.
They were inexpensive, reliable, customizable, flexible and a joy to use with pretty well any Linux or BSD you’d like.
I’m very sad I won’t be able to look forward to a future revision for my next hardware refresh.
On the other hand every raspberry pi I’ve played with has died within 6mo to a year, and while most Linuxy things worked great, I found there were some invisible walls you hit when you tried to get too far outside the predetermined ecosystem (things controlled by firmware blobs) and the inability to run x86 code was more annoying than I was expecting.
What other tiny, multi-nic, expandable, x64 based, inexpensive, reliable headless solutions are out there to fill the void?