On 2020-11-16, Noth <[email protected]> wrote: > Buy a switch, and buy the APU4. Two ports don't get used, so what?
For starters, that means you at least might as well use APU2 instead (which is often easier to buy - not all vendors have the APU4 - PCEngines don't sell direct in some countries other than to business customers). (and the price *difference* between APU2E0 and APU4 at some vendors is enough to buy a pi4...) > It'll be more reliable long term than a RPi4. Do you have evidence to back this up? People were saying the same about PCEngines not being reliable compared to Soekris too. It all seems nonsense. Old rpi 1 and 2 machines are still running fine doing the job they were intended to do. I'm not claiming there's anything amazing about them but if they're capable of doing the job in the first place I don't see any real concern about hardware reliability. > A router with only one physical port isn't a router, it's a host, no > matter how many vlans you throw at it. The combination of the computer and switch together can be considered a router. Plenty of "hardware" routers just have 1 or 2 real network interfaces (either on the SOC or a separate device) and run a larger number of ports off a vlan capable switch chip - sure it's in one box and looks like a coherent unit, but architecturally no different. Yes there are drawbacks of doing it this way but some advantages too. (There are other options like some of the Octeon boxes, which can often be bought second-hand for similar prices to RPi4, but I don't know what sort of router performance can be expected from them, and if they don't work out they're not reusable in nearly as many other roles as RPi4 or the other arm64 boards supported by OpenBSD would be).
