I’ve had the NUC running as my home server for a while now, and twice in the past couple of days its main NIC has crashed. I’m thinking it could be thermals, so I moved it around a bit to give it more breathing room.
This is making me rethink my want to use it in the case in lieu of a Fitlet3. The Fitlet3 is designed for industrial locations, so it is all passive cooling and should easily handle partially climate-controlled environments swimmingly. Plus, it would be new hardware, which is a plus for longevity.
I’m also starting to wonder if I really need a local Plex server on it. As cool an idea as it is, it’s not super practical when the device has VPN access to the home LAN, and the local Plex also has remote access enabled. Not to mention in past years we accessed a friend’s Plex server for media consumption during the convention weekend.
With just having the firewall VM, a local domain controller VM, a Pi-Hole VM, I could get away with only 8 GB of RAM in the system with room to spare as well as a smaller SSD. It’s only $20 more for the 16 GB RAM stick direct from CompuLab, so for some ability to give more RAM to the firewall VM, that’s a good idea. If I need more storage, well, it’s easy enough to replace the drive and restore from backup. The cost difference from 256 GB up to 1 TB isn’t worth it at the present time with opting not to have a local Plex server any more.
In other news, everything has arrived and is in the apartment now. I’ve moved my WiFi over to the CBW150AX I picked up to replace the Meraki AP, and it’s working nicely. The ceiling plate has a screw to secure the AP to it, so that solves mounting in the case.
The Fitlet3 will use the VESA mount likely on some standoffs, the switch is still up in the air, but either way there will be a tray above it for the AP. I would like for it to be just beneath the case’s lip, but that’s likely not best for the WiFi pattern, so the range extenders will just go in another bag, probably my laptop bag if I deem them needed.
This still has less need as the local conventions here are close enough to home to take public transit, though if the rest of the group decides to attend in future years or I decide to attend other cons outside the Seattle area, it will be needed, so I’m going to go ahead with the plan sometime in the future.