Hi folks. Currently thinking of buying a new SBC since my Odroid HC4 died i am looking to buy a new sbc as my home Server. I would be mainly running portainer with the following apps:
- pihole
- wallabag
- conduit
- revolt ( optional)
- grocy (optional have to try first )
- wireguard
The orange pi 5 with 8gb RAM seemed like a good choice, but the 4 or even 3B models are even a bit cheaper. What do you guys think. Should I go for a prior gen or even a different SBC entirely?
For Pihole or any other firewall applications two ethernet ports are nice and not many SBCs have that.
For Conduit or any other Matrix server, fast storage connection, ideally a NVMe drive is also very useful and again not many SBCs have that.
Are two ports really necessary for PiHole? I guess if you have EVERY device in your house pointed at it and you have a LOT of devices, maybe…
Not in the slightest. Even with a couple hundred devices pointed at it you’re not going to exhaust a 1Gb port. It’s just answering DNS queries, it’s not a firewall in and of itself.
I’m currently running a PiHole, haven’t found a use for a potential 2nd Ethernet port. It’s not a router or firewall, both of which have value for two Ethernet ports.
To be fair, the PiHole is just doing a firewall function: DNS filtering. If you have a fully featured router/firewall like PFsense, you can do everything a PiHole does using that. So I see how one could argue that a PiHole might benefit from dual NICs, but in practice, for home users, I agree that it’s not necessary.
No, not strictly necessary.