I purchased a firewall appliance with 4 ports and installed opnsense on it. Best decision of my self-hosted life.
Get one with two 10gbps ports and you are set. Passive cooled, small factor, Intel atom CPU. 4gb ram is plentiful.
On aliexpress can be found for 100€ or little more.
Even much better than an OpenWRT, which I love and use but delegate to internal network (WiFi access points) rather than perimetral defense.
Has docker compose file for deployment
Can be hosted on sub-path and not only subdomain
Can easily be integrated into SSO lime authelia
That's why you should always use them as jbod and setup Linux software raid (or zfs raid? Not familiar) directly.
Never go without a raid... Not a good idea in any case.
As for heat, I used jbod enclosures with fan, anything with more than 2 drives should have one, or don't bother.
I wouldn't go with single drive enclosures (even if I did for 10 years) as better not to cheap out on this matter. A 4 x 10€ cheap enclosure might be tempting, but shilling out 100€ for a nice actively cooled 4-disk jbod is a much better choice. Then go sw raid on top of it.
Yes there is someone talking everybody down about USB enclosures*.
Maybe he got burned or something...
Can say never had an issue and I replaced many motherboards over 20 years, and also many enclosures.
Don't go too cheap, but don't worry too much. I highly recommend a raid setup anyway. And always do backups, bit this is unrelated to USB specifically
I used USB enclosures for my RAIDs for over 20 years. The turning point has been usb3 and then usb-c even better, but I found really no difference as in the bottleneck where the mechanical drives.
Moved to an all internal sata setup a few months back because I upgraded the space and moved to a desktop form factor.
Can still recommend the USB approach tough.
BUY A QUALITY EBCLOSURE.
I always used Linux software raid, but purchased a 4 slots USB raid/jbod enclosure to keep the number of used USB ports down.
I never ever had issues with the setup, but I purchased a known-brand enclosure, one with also e-SATA, which unfortunately was/is more a fad than even been really used.
Grazie ragazzi del grande lavoro dietro le quinte.
I am doing split tunnel since years without knowing :)
Thanks, I learned something new.
Can you detail the split tunnel part?
I did ru my nas over USB for 20 years. Never had an issue. But I never had more than 6 USB drives and 2 or 3 USB network Ethernet card tough.
All with Linux software raid.
Switched to a full desktop case and now enjoying internal sata.
Wireguard or ssh tunnel with port forwards, both works.
Yeah, there are workarounds... And who knows, maybe its just safer than public ip... But definitely require some external fixture.
My family has a junk home, not just a drawer :)