Some Off-Label Uses for Small Form Factor Machines

we here at level one are always talking about upgrading your networking equipment or your router or the Forbidden router or something equally more insane or fun and we've also got a series coming up on really getting started at level one for replacing everything in your home network because the stuff that your ISP gives you is junk so look for that but this video is about some creative off-label uses of stuff you can do from small form factor machines [Music] this video is brought to you by ingenious which is what I use at home for my wireless which is a very difficult situation I love it couldn't be happier I've tested both the cloud managed and the on-premise managed ingenious Hardware which is different except for now we've got a newcomer to the ingenious family the ingenious fit line of devices here I've got the fit six four by four Wi-Fi 6 dual band indoor access point ews 377 fit you should definitely check this one out you should check out my full review but this access point two and a half gigabit power over ethernet two and a half gigabit Wi-Fi 6E you can do 1.1 gigabit in the 2.4 gigahertz band and let me tell you this access point excels with a lot of old crappy 2.4 gigahertz devices setting these up could not be easier even for a mesh and you don't have to decide how many devices you need in the mesh right now you just take it out of the box you take a picture of a QR code and you're good to go if you don't want to use your mobile phone there is a web management portal you can use that instead or you can do total on-premise management although at the time that I'm making this ad that's not quite done yet but that is one of the advertised features of the ingenious fit is being able to manage it on premise the underlying Hardware that ingenious has sort of co-opted for their product is extremely well built and that's what drew me to ingenious in the first place so check out that ad check out the new ingenious fit line it may be more of a fit for what you're looking for it doesn't have all of the features of the higher end access points but they're also less expensive but you still get that 4x4 antenna Hardware it's really just a software change all right on with the video now the very first video that we did for level one was about a small form factor system like this one I think this is a third or a fourth gen Intel system this particular one's an i5 and these are pretty cool because you can get them for 10 20 30 at corporate Surplus this one I've outfitted with an intel 80 gigabyte SATA SSD and a dual uh one gig network adapter I also said Barnacle is one of these actually I gave it to him at LTX like two years ago because he was sort of on a struggle bus with his router he couldn't find one that would switch it gigabit speeds plus also provided vlans plus also did some other networking stuff I don't know you get fancy and then pretty soon you're spending kind of a lot of money on a router and this is literally made from E-Waste and costs less than a hundred dollars things have progressed a bit since that first video that we did and this is still a viable option there's really not a lot to to do to add to that video you should check it out the thing that's happening here though is that a lot of isps are offering faster than one gigabit speeds and a lot of these lower costs and older machines only have a network card in them that is one gigabit in the other video the true level one series about your router and your Wi-Fi upgrades and the crap your ISP gives you we didn't want to get super technical this video is a little more Technical and talks about when your internet speed really is faster than a gigabit five gigabit two gigabit for the new Google Fiber two and a half gigabit in some areas two and a half gig is the ethernet wire line speed five gigabit is a bit less popular most of the interface speeds are 10 gigabit and then the ISP will sort of control your speed to be less than 10 gigabit they'll throttle you basically on a 10 gigabit connection but it can be a little tricky to find a router that has a two and a half gig connection a t with their five gig rollout they were one of the first you know large quote-unquote isps to roll that out of course in Tennessee we have the community in the co-op fiber that have been offering 10 gig service for like five years now but for ATT their modem they do it actually on a different local network and their modem is still pretty crabtacular there's a five gigabit interface on it and then it's got three one gig interfaces they couldn't even be bothered to the expense of having a couple of 2.5 gig interfaces when you're paying for five gigabit internet you can only use it on one port and of course finding a five gigabit switch huge headache and older 10 gigabit Knicks don't really work properly with two and a half or five gig the oldest card you can do that on is the Intel x550 and that's not a guarantee that Nick may not work properly at two and a half or five gig especially if it's running an older firmware because you got to jump through hoops to install the firmware that gets pretty technical we covered that on the level one Forum if you need help flashing that come there there's a thread a how-to for being able to upgrade your x550 Intel doesn't even really call it firmware they use their own terminology and it's just all types of weird if you're using something newer like in a quantia chipset or a Marvel chipset generally those do support two and a half and five gig a little bit better if third 10 gig ethernet adapter or you may have native two and a half gig support right on your motherboard negative 5 gig support it's not really a thing yet mostly two and a half gig that's the i-225v or the i-225v2 which solves some bugs and the V3 which solves some more bugs and then there's the real Tech two and a half gig chipset which honestly even though it's more CPU overhead like it uses more CPU Cycles to use the Realtek adapter versus the Intel adapter if Realtek has had less bugs than the Intel Network thing hopefully Pat gelsinger is going to fix all that because oh boy fun times so it does actually get a little dicey when you want to build a router that can do two and a half gig or better you can still use E-Waste so like our Dell E-Waste here we could slam an Intel x550 into this thing and we can get the firmware upgrade and jump through the hoops and then bam we can be rocking a router that can interface with our isps modem at two and a half or five gig assuming the firmware update works it's a headache and it takes a lot of time and most of the time your you know internet speed it's only two and a half gig two and a half gig makes are pretty cheap they're like 20 bucks so looking on eBay the x550 is like a hundred dollars it's not worth a hundred dollars it's worth like 20 or 25 dollars it's an old card it runs hot and there's also the Intel X540 forget about it it's an older process that card runs even hotter it's just it wasn't a good news card when it first came out and this is like a decade later so just let it go let it go I see you in the audience rocking your Xeon e5602 5603 just just let those E-Series xeons go too none of that really matters there is a low-cost option well there is a low-cost option if you want small and sexy foreign this is the um 450 from minisforum this is a ryzen 4500u it's six cores and six threads it doesn't even do multi-threading which is actually kind of a nice security thing but it is fast it is very very fast even though it's six scores this processor will run circles around pretty much anything except application specific ICS that are built specifically to run in routers generally those will work faster but if we're doing special purpose things and running our own operating system something like this works really well the problem with a lot of these small form factor machines especially the inexpensive ones this one's just about 200 if you get a Bare Bones one is that it's only got the one two and a half gig Lan now you could use USB lands but USB generally is not built for five nines reliability and I wouldn't really recommend that fortunately there is a better solution this in adapters like this this is an Intel 225v on an m key m.2 these are available in both m key and E key which means that you can pop out this Wi-Fi adapter and replace it with an Intel two and a half gig Nick you could replace this with a 10 gigabit Nick there are 10 gig versions of this you can replace this with an m.2 that actually has two Intel 225vs on it so dual two and a half gig and then all of a sudden you've got two maybe three two and a half gigabit interfaces in this tiny little package then the problem becomes okay I'm going to install your m.2 what do we do for our operating system storage well these things also support SATA so my Plucky little 80 gigabyte Intel SSD which this is single level cells these are the most reliable flash you can get that's why I'm using this and we just pop this in here it's actually designed for two and a half inch SSD mounting and then boom two three two and a half gigabit network interfaces dedicated network interfaces we still do vlans and stuff like that to have even more interfaces but we can plug this into our isps connection and have our two and a half gig interface this will work with pfSense it'll work with open sense it'll work with open wrt it'll work with pretty much anything under the sun because again it's the Intel 225v that we're adding in you can get the Realtek if you'd rather have the real Tech as opposed to the Intel 225v there are eBay sellers selling the Realtek two and a half gigabit Dragon chipset to augment the built-in Intel 2.5 gigabit Nikon AMD 450 with an Intel Nook yeah that's just how we roll you can get less expensive stuff that has a faster CPU it doesn't have to be the one for Mini's Forum but I love this use case for the relatively inexpensive 450. if you get the Bare Bones version it doesn't come with storage which you don't need anyway and it doesn't come with ram Harvest some Ram out of an old laptop for this use case you really don't need dual Channel memory but if you're doing intrusion detection or any kind of traffic analysis or packet analysis it is useful to have the Dual Channel memory but mostly you don't need it six cores and six threads is that enough to route two and a half gigabit that is plenty enough to route two and a half gigabit it's going to add minimal latency for your routing overhead and everything else and arguably you'll be able to run more complicated firewall rules with this setup now you might be thinking well this isn't very convenient I mean this thing obviously wasn't designed like how does the other network cable plug in this thing is really compact there's not a lot of room here well you've got a 3D printer don't you or you know somebody that's got one boom enter the 3D printable level one text replacement bottom for your minis Forum machine so you just 3D print this you pop the PCB that comes with your m.2 single or dual port adapter files are available in there you screw this into the bottom because hey the screw holes align and boom you've got your dual 45 gigabit at the rear of your minis Forum um 450 and this thing screams when it's being used for this particular use case now if you'd rather use your USB drive for your your boot operating system or whatever that's totally fine that's not really recommended for PF sensor open sense you totally can it totally works open wrt and router distributions of that it'll that'll work a little better but uh I you know you got to say to Port use the SATA port plus also if you put a bigger say to drive in there maybe you've got a 200 or 500 gig sided Drive laying around you can do some really big packet captures you'd be surprised how chatty some of your applications are for different ports and hosts if you're running something like pie hole you can really capture a lot of information about the conversations your computer is trying to have when you're not there with advertisers or marketing beacons etc etc if you're rocking things like an LG TV or a Samsung TV you'd be surprised about how chatty those devices are it's probably enough to make you just want to disconnect those from the Internet or block them at the router level and sometimes when you block them at the router level they freak out trying to see if there's some sort of hole it's like oh I've been blocked a little bit and then all of a sudden the number of servers they're connecting to and DNS and everything else goes way way up it's really interesting stuff if you like that sort of thing and in this kind of a setup with custom soft software will let you do stuff that you would never be able to do if you're a tech Enthusiast or really interested in these kinds of things on the Quest for the perfect router we're on the BIOS screen which is kind of a worst case scenario 17 watts and we can see there are two Intel 225 vmix are perfectly detected if you get the three Nick you'd see three there three i-225vs or if you opted for the real Tech you may or may not see it just depends but it's right there right in our minis Forum um 450 bios it is a buried option but I do recommend setting the resume power after power loss because it's that is under the AMD CBS menu so be sure to turn that on and we can see that our Intel SSD is being detected correctly now if you don't want to use the 3D printable replacement bottom for your minis Forum PC which does fit a lot more than just the um 450 if you wanted to get something higher in but truthfully the um 450 for this use case is kind of Overkill I mean you don't need 16 gigabytes of memory for this eight would be plenty then you could just Notch out the rear case for the cables and just have a little pigtail for your second Nick or second and third Nick depending on which way you want to rock from here it's just a question of software and a USB stick with open sense or PF sense it will be pretty easy to install we'll go through open sense real quick I'm assuming you know how to make a USB installer once you've got your USB installer created from there it's pretty easy we're just going to plug it in installation is pretty straightforward you can use it on a live USB if you don't want to install it to the hard drive like I say but it's more supported on the open sense side than the PF sense side but really I would recommend you just go ahead and install it to the SATA hard drive it wouldn't bother showing you how to do that the password is opensense open s-e-n-se all lower case by default and the username that you want to use for the installer is installer which when you log in as installer it starts the installer makes sense you probably also want to start it with no network connected at all because depending on the flip a coin roll the dice if it's plugged into the network it could start its own DHCP server which can could conflict with your local DHCP server it could cause problems just unplug in the network when you're setting it up if you just want something that's easy and goes fast you don't really need this level of technical detail you don't have to worry about it to this level but if you're curious about that kind of thing come to the level one forum for like-minded individuals let's touch base let's have a powwow let's get together let's figure out what sort of scratches the itch that you have because I've got a two I'm level this level one I'm signing out and I'll you can find me in the level one forms I'll find you in the level one forums you'll find me in the level one forums I think that's how that goes it's 3D printable what's not to love thank you [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 44,535

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 4N_x2PFWALM

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 13 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/prototype__]

Thanks /u/wendelltron!

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It really feels like minilabbing is getting more attention in articles and videos over these last few months. Perhaps people are finding how much power is available at small cost while they are looking for ways to save some dollars...

[u/AzGig]

Great video!