For a few years now I've used a Cubietruck as a "gateway" for my home network - it mostly just runs nginx as a reverse proxy for the various other computers I have to expose them to the internet via HTTPS.

 

It still runs as good as it always has, I chose it for the task because:

2GB RAM

at the time a reasonably fast CPU - dual 1GHz A7's

"real" gigabit network interface

built in battery management, so no need to worry about power failures corrupting anything

sata support for local disk

 

All of these points are now no longer relevant. Over the years I have amassed a few more SBC's, many of which also have 2GB RAM, a faster CPU, faster GBe and SATA/USB 3 

I've also invested in a standalone UPS.

 

As of yesterday I had my internet connection upgrade from 100/20Mbit to "gigabit" (real speed is around 900 down, 500 up). The poor little A20 can't even hope keep up with that, along with SSL encryption.

My choices are:

Odroid HC1

Odroid XU4 in a cloudshell

Asus Tinkerboard

Pine64

... or something else

 

I've got some rpi2's and an rpi3, but they're never going to cut it either, with everything going through a single USB 2 port.

 

I'm thinking if I were to buy something new, it would be better to go for something less tablet/stb focused, like a Marvel Armada, with much better internal IO design.

 

Thoughts/opinions/suggestions?

 

 
I'm thinking if I were to buy something new, it would be better to go for something less tablet/stb focused, like a Marvel Armada, with much better internal IO design.
 
Thoughts/opinions/suggestions?
 

My solution for a similar problem: Mikrotik Routerboard. Can do everything a router can do (incl. running Samba). And I don't have to worry about OS updates. Mikrotik does that and from experience (3 different devices, 3 years), they are rock-solid as is their update procedure.

They are primarily routers and WiFi access points though. Not sure they can be SSL gateway.

Harald

I've been thinking Espressobin, but the Armbian support for it isn't stable yet.

 

Not too keen on a RouterBoard, they seem very particular about their OS license fees (being tired to a hard drive, costs money to transfer) and it's all proprietary (running a 3.x linux kernel? doubious GPL compliance). I don't need any router features, I have a router already.

Thumb-twiddling time for me. I did some non-scientific benchmarks and it looks like my cubietruck was quite pathetic. It maxes out at around 80MBit delivering large files over TLS from and NFS share.

My HC1 got over 300MBit with the same set up, no difference for TLS or plain HTTP, maxed out at 85% of a single big core, I think the bottleneck is the drives in my synology nas or the nas itself... kind of slow. The drives should be good for 80 - 120MB/s according to various bencharks of Seagate ST4000VN000's