I’ve been eyeing these devices for some time now. The price point is… delicious!

I saw some opensource-ish project one day that mentioned that they are building an OS around Plex and other media servers and using these N5105s and selling the package for USD500ish (I think).

So I went hunting for the hardware and found it on Aliexpress for that cheap (sub USD200).

Does anyone have experience running these? How hard is it to get Ubuntu running on them? I dislike that they ship with Windows 11. Would be a few bucks cheaper if they shipped with Ubuntu or no OS, right?

Also, what about running docker on them? Can they support your usual homelab stuff? Portainer, Pi-hole, *arr softwares, a dashboard, etc.

  • arkcom@kbin.social
    4·
    1 year ago

    wish these companies making soft routers would give a couple options with a nas case instead. 4 bay n5105 or n100 for cheap would be a nice low power side grade to my old e3,

  • priapus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I just picked up a similar one that i’ll use as a router. They work just like any normal hardware, you can do pretty much anything you’d want on them. Also they definitely are not paying for windows licenses, so they probably wouldn’t be any cheaper without.

  • Panja@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I use an N5105 for my Opnsense firewall and run Adguard Home on it as well. Installing software on it was incredibly easy. Mine was barebones, had no OS, and it has an American Megatrends BIOS so it was as easy as selecting boot from USB.

    I have no doubt it could run a small homelab. I have my Unraid running on a worse quad core gen 4 i5 processor (20+ docker images, 1 VM).

    The only downside I would point out is that some of these things are passively cooled and put out some HEAT. It looks like yours has a fan so that’s nice. Maybe another would be Plex transcoding… depending on how many people you have on your Plex you maybe could run into some transcoding issues.

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I only have myself and a family member. It’s mostly local use, but I do tend to use on multiple platforms - tv, phone, tablet. So my current setup does get around to transcoding a lot. Thanks for telling me about your gen4 i5 running a bunch of docker containers :)

  • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    The link points to the J4125 priced at USD99. I’m thinking of the second one - 8GB/256GB N5105. Or maybe even the N100, since it has more RAM on it.

  • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    I can’t open the link due to how I’ve configured my browser: is this an integrated board? Could you pull the specifications?

    • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      It’s a mini PC (literally just a box). 8/16GB DDR4 RAM, 128/256/512GB 2.5 HDD, processor model options are Intel N5105/N100/N5095/J4125/N95. WIFI5 and Bluetooth 4. 2 USB 2s, 2 USB 3. No USB-C. Windows 11 Pro preloaded (ugh).

      But more importantly, how have you configured your browser? It’s a direct link to Aliexpress with no tracking middleware. Have you just blocked shopping sites to stay away from them?

        • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I’m considering using it either as a plex server with transcoding, or for CI/CD work using github actions to do some data pipelines and npm builds.

          • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            How many clients are you serving? That box is too OP for just a plex server.

            I think I could run at least a dozen k3s containers on that, with enough RAM and storage

            • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              No clients. Just me and another family member. I’d love to hear how you’d serve up a dozen containers on that. How much RAM? 16 gigs?

              • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Admittedly, I don’t know if Plex is CPU heavy.

                I could run a bunch of applications like a reverse-proxy, a load-balancer, a DNS resolver, a VPN server, an rysnc/Syncthing server, scripts to archive data, downloaders, an internal CA (although that might not be the best idea since you need to carefully back it up), an MQTT server, and maybe other things. These are random examples that came to mind, I’m sure there’s plenty more that can be done.

                Yes, I would go about 2TB of SSD storage and maybe 16-32GB RAM, although the latter might be overkill for this CPU.

                Cheers

                • damnthefilibuster@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  out of all those, I’m most curious about that MQTT server. What’s your usecase for that? These CPUs don’t support anything more than 16GB RAM, so there’s that :)

      • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I don’t exactly remember what I have set up (will have to revisit my config, using Librewolf), but websites like Aliexpress are serious offenders of partial/incomplete redirection requests. Librewolf doesn’t like such behaviour, and neither do I.