Honestly, I suggest going onto ebay and buying an old server hardware. My TrueNAS and OpnSense boxes as well as my 10G switch and my 48 port 1G switch were purchased used on ebay. My TrueNAS came from UnixSurplus https://www.ebay.com/str/unixsurpluscom and I have purchased hardware for others from them. They list their TrueNAS ready systems under FreeNAS but it doesn’t matter, the HBA’s are flashed to IT mode already so all you need to do is add drives and install an OS.

Yes 10G can be useful if you have a lot of users or transfer large files. I edit video and I store it all on my server.

Yes 8GB of RAM will be limiting, ZFS needs a minimum of 16GB to function correctly.

The switches and AP’s shouldn’t care what the router OS is. I use OpnSense, my 10G switch is a Quanta LB6M, my 1G study is a Dell Power Connect 5548, I have 2 TP-Link EAP650 AP’s with a TP-Link Omada OC200 controller and will be adding another AP when my upstairs is finished.

For POE I just use an injector with my Power Connect. My AP’s, the OC200, and multiple cameras are all POE.

I’ve found that if the equipment powers up and works for a week it will continue to do so for a long time, I’ve used the Quanta LB6M since 2016 or so.

I will have to take another look. I’ve seen it before but didn’t see anything about Lemmy and such.

I use Reolink. Some of the older cameras don’t work as well but setting them to reboot on a schedule works pretty well.

Frigate is not able to control the PTZ function of my RLC-823S1 but the Duo 3V is amazing. I would like to be able to track people who step onto my porch so I can get an image of their vehicle or direction of travel, but I mainly just use it to look around if I hear a noise.

Hardware routers can be killed for many reasons. Age and an inability to upgrade them to suit current needs is the biggest one. OEM’s do this fairly quickly as they build devices with the resources to work for today and maybe tomorrow. After their product is no longer made they want it to be obsolete not long after so they can claim they can support is no longer viable. Then you but another router and they make money.

OpenWRT tries to augment and support devices for as long as possible but at the same time the hardware limitations still exist and often the storage will no longer support the latest version due to the size of the new version.

As far as when that will happen depends on multiple factors that have the ability to change at any time. There viable be a massive flaw in a portion of the software that requires a huge rewrite and the addition of code that will make the software too large to fit.

Sometimes someone will create a version with less used features available so that it can still be used but it’s a losing battle

If you want true longevity repurpose an old computer into a router. OpnSense is what I use and recommend. Add in something like a TP-Link EAP650 or two and you have a rock solid platform that can handle a lot more and last much longer. Add Power Over Ethernet (POE) along with an Omada controller and you can position the AP in a place where it will work the best for your use. You can have enough access points to have a full signal anywhere even if your place is the size of the Louvre. When new technology comes out you can upgrade the AP’s as needed when needed and upgrade the router as well in a similar fashion.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. Honestly I want to host a Lemmy instance and my own peertube instance.

Two things are stopping me. I don’t understand certain points of how things interact in the software or how to set it up properly to self host and be comfortable in it’s security. I barely understand docker and some other stuff. It sucks because I understood how to use DOS at an around 14 by reading the manual. I also don’t have the funding to do so in a way that I would feel comfortable at this point. I don’t fully trust co-mingling my home services with web services due to the security risks.

I keep a monitor in my server closet and bring a USB wireless mini keyboard if I need to physically access something but the majority of my hardware has KVM built in.

Older commercial hardware uses more power than a mini computer in a homelab but has many advantages like often coming with more ram, more powerful (and often multiple) CPU’s, SAS backplanes, plus empty PCIe slots that can support GPU’s and other devices.

Yep. I’m using sata drives in a SAS backplane that has similar connectors soldered to a board.

The exact backplane I am using is: https://files.ekmcdn.com/itinstock/images/supermicro-sas846a-24-bay-3.5-lff-sas-sata-hdd-4u-backplane-bpn-sas-846a-4-93512-p.jpg

The cable connections don’t mean anything. SAS is multichannel and with expanders (expanders work like ethernet switches) one controller can interface with hundreds of drives.

The cable you have pictured is called a breakout cable that dedicates one of the cards individual channels to a drive. If you plug one drive into the cable and spin it up no big deal, add another later on same thing, move a dive from one cable to the other it’s all good. The cables are just electrical data connections to the controller. With ZFS you can even migrate compatible drives from SAS to SATA controllers (SAS only work on SAS, but sata works on either) in the system and they will still function just fine in a pool. For that matter I’ve heard of people mixing SAS, SATA, and USB drives in the same vDev (not generally recommended) and things worked.