What smallish PC with three gigabit ethernet ports?

marcosscriven

marcosscriven

marcosscriven

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I'd like to build a small and silent windows PC with three gigabit ethernet ports.

The reason being as I'd like to run it as an internet bonding router, per the instructions here http://www.connectify.me/blog/how-to-share-speedify-with-your-hotspot/

So I need one ethernet connection each for:
  • WAN connection 1
  • WAN connection 2
  • LAN sharing connection
Wondering if anyone can suggest one? M'boards tend to have only one or two.
 
Check eBay and alike for Sophos compatible hardware, some great mini pc with up to 8 nic ;)

To expand on that, also search pfsense, picopc and intel j1900 or E3850 from memory.
 
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How small is small? ITX or smaller?

How much processing grunt do you really need? Check out the PC Engine APU2C4. That has 3 NICs, 4GB RAM, AES support, mSATA, SATA and sips power. Silent too. I think it'll run Windows being an X86 derivative.

I have one running pfsense at home, and it's been flawless.
 
what's the actual purpose of bonding in your scenario though?

I've not personally used speedify/connectify, but a quick look on reddit doesn't look exactly fill me with confidence.
 
The purpose is to aggregate two ISP connections so that both the downstream and upstream aggregates are close to their sum, and appear as a single connection to both incoming and outgoing traffic.

To do that properly (rather than just load balance, round robin, PCQ or not), one needs a termination point in a datacentre, with a public IP. There's various expensive hardware solutions and roll-you-own software solutions.

As a rough proof of concept though, I wanted to use Connectify + Speedify. Connectify obviously has native alternatives in Linux, but there's no such equivalent service for Speedify that has a Linux client, hence a cheap and small Windows box.
 
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