oaknode 4-Port Firewall Appliance

The N100's 6W TDP means passive cooling copes with ordinary router work indefinitely. The fan option is for the situations where heat has nowhere to go: a closed wall cabinet, a loft in summer, or a box running Suricata across every interface while also hosting a couple of VMs.

• Leave it passive on an open shelf or wall-mounted with the fins vertical.
• Add the fan in a sealed network cabinet or beside a hot modem and PoE switch.
• Add the fan if the box will run sustained CPU load, such as IDS or transcoding.
• Pick a slim 80 × 10mm model; thicker fans will not fit the space the header is meant for.

Idle draw depends mostly on how many ports have a link, the SSD and the memory; a small fan adds little on top. Hedged ranges are collected under N100 power consumption.

Fanless hardware always runs warm to the touch under load. That is the case doing its job, not a warning sign. More on heat and throttling in passive boxes lives under fanless N100 mini PCs.

Two native NVMe slots mean a mirrored ZFS boot pool with no adapters. OPNsense and Proxmox both install onto a mirror, and a router whose boot drive fails without a mirror takes the whole house offline until someone reinstalls.

• Pair two identical small NVMe drives for a mirrored router install.
• Put the 2.5-inch SATA drive to work as a backup target or media store.
• Keep a rescue image on a TF card in the slot.

oaknode quotes support for one to four NVMe drives. The two native slots account for two. Going beyond that depends on adapter hardware, so ask oaknode which adapter it means before planning a four-drive layout. For a router that also serves files, the trade-offs are laid out under N100 home servers.

Put the boot drive in the x4 slot if you use only one. A router barely touches it, but a Proxmox host reading VM disks will notice the extra bandwidth.

A pure firewall needs nowhere near that. OPNsense with DNS filtering and a VPN endpoint is comfortable in 8GB. The large ceiling matters once the router runs as one VM among several on Proxmox.

1. 8GB: dedicated OPNsense, pfSense or OpenWrt.
2. 16GB: router plus Suricata, a UniFi controller and a few containers.
3. 32–48GB: Proxmox host with a router VM and several full VMs beside it.

The N100 runs one memory channel whatever you fit, so a single large stick costs nothing in bandwidth against two smaller ones. The first boot after a memory change can sit on a blank screen while the board trains the module; give it a minute.

Four i226-V ports with filtered jacks handle the networking, on FreeBSD's native igc driver. OPNsense, OpenWrt, Linux and ESXi are the systems oaknode names; pfSense from 2.7 onward uses the same driver. AES-NI speeds IPsec and OpenVPN with AES ciphers.

That makes the Montvfieto four-port the closest substitute, with the caveat that its spec sheet names a Twin Lake chip and a 3.8GHz clock, so check which processor it carries.

The Dozlzyp appliance takes a different route: a lengthened aluminium chassis, two NVMe slots, TPM 2.0 and a 32GB memory ceiling, with versions that add COM ports. The CWWK box suits anyone who would rather unbox it with memory and an SSD already fitted.

• Pick oaknode for the 48GB memory rating, SATA plus two NVMe, and the included fan cable.
• Pick Dozlzyp for TPM 2.0 or a version with serial ports.
• Pick CWWK for a ready-to-boot build.

Eight USB ports, two of them USB 3.0, are more than a router needs, but they help when the box turns into a small server with a UPS, a Zigbee stick and a backup drive attached. HDMI and DisplayPort both drive 4K@60Hz for install day and rescue work.

Barebone means a two-item shopping list: one DDR5 SO-DIMM and at least one M.2 2280 NVMe drive. Enable Auto Power On in the BIOS, reached with the Delete key, so the router comes back by itself after a power cut. The wider field of router boxes is compared under N100 firewall mini PCs.