So a while ago at a carboot sale, I picked up 2 Dell Optiplex Micros
The first was an i3 3020m with a 4th gen i3 CPU in and 4GB Ram, the other was a G4400T 3040 with 4GB Ram. Its the latter I have been working on with this project.
As I am on annual leave for a week I figured its a good time to explore my options, media server? nah, home server, maybe but I have a ThinkCentre for that (laters)
While I have been happy with by Cudy+OpenWrtbased mesh network (except for one or two previous issues outlined in previous blog entries) I have felt that something is not as good as it could be, when I ran PFSense and OPNSence the network felt snappier, so I figured lets make a router.
The 3040m has a m.2 slot and a removable VGA module so I had a look for an affordable m.2 to Ethernet adaptor – I chose a £10.99 DollaTek M.2 A+E 2.5Gb Network Adapter RTL8125BG Chip from Amazon
Yes, I know that the PF and OPN sense firewalls are not so keen on Realtek, probably a good thing that I will be using something else…
So the VGA module is held in by a metal retainer, this proved awkward to reshape to allow the Ethernet port to be accessible, but I managed to do it!
That internal bracker probably wont go back to the shape it was before, but it seems to hold the Ethernet securely
It was then down to confirming it word work.. So I entered the bios and change the “wlan card” setting to active….
It works!
I tested it in Windows and a random Linux distribution (BookwormPup) both recognised the card as a 2.5gb Ethernet device and fastdotcom speed test had good results for my internet connection.
Now the basics are done what next?
The G4400T is used in quite a few commercial firewalls, however I would like to get a suitable quad-core, preferably without hyper-threading so maybe a i5-6400t, i5-6500t or i5-6600t so I will be doing a little shopping before I decide which firewall software I use.
Looks like this post will get a sequel…. soon ish I hope