yes that was the first thing I did, followed by a bios update, and an os change
CWWK/Topton/... Nxxx quad NIC router
- Thread starter Becks0815
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i'm using proxmox on both units, i previously used mdadm on the host to create the raid5 between the disks and then lvm on top passing the vdisk to the vm (genuine dsm instance) and worked great.. then i had a failure of one of the 4 nvme disk (unrelated to any other hardware, was actually a disk problem) and took the opportunity to switch from mdadm to native zfs, the vms did obviously not break the underlaying disk handling is transparent to them.
the unit with the multi disk board is a n305 and has an uptime of more than 2 months now without any downtime (since the mdadm to zfs switch), stock kernel 6.8.12-10-pve, no optimization or tuning or custom parameters.
Well I let my friends convince me to try and create my own home network so I can learn some new skills. Learning and programming my layer 3 switch was fun, and getting it ready to go and connect to my N150 Mini Pc firewall started out as fun but soon turned into a nightmare. Not sure how I let them convince me to make an aliexpress account to order this mini PC. The only plus was I got it before the tariffs caused your items to get stopped in customs for a fee. I digress, I ended up ordering a Topton X2E N150, and since it did not come with any paperwork and I am new to buying random Chinese hardware I am only guessing that the bios saying my project version of BK-1264NP-N150 Ver: 41.5 has something to do with the mobo in that thing. I am also referencing one of Pinako’s posts in a different forum topic where he states “They came with H30W-N150-226 motherboard and AMI Aptio 2.22.1293 UEFI/BIOS (BK-1264NP-N150 Ver: 41.5 from 12/15/2024).” Which helped me possibly figure out what motherboard I actually have. However going to toptonpc you get tons of direction as to any firmware updates for the board there. And it’s been a few days without an email back from their support. Either way this was fun until I had to spend my days testing the mini pc to see how long I can get it to consecutively run without freezing in stasis or rebooting. I am still learning a lot in my journey and have extremely limited knowledge in Linux and “bsd” filesystems.
For my testing I have my pfsense stripped down to full defaults with only one single Ethernet lan connection to my pc to run continual pings and with the reported thermal sensors not reporting anything above 46degrees Celsius it is still randomly restarting. I then adjusted pfsense setting of Intel speed shift to 90% efficiency to see if it can have an uptime longer than 8 hours. If anyone can suggest anything else that can be simply adjusted in the bios that may help me I would appreciate it. If it involves command line I am not opposed but I don’t really know any commands for filesystems outside of windows. I see a lot of people point toward the PSU being an issue, so I have also ordered another to test. I have thermal paste but I was deterred by a friend from removing the heatsink and case from the cpu side because they could have a certain amount of pressure that I wouldn’t be able to replicate. I am not sure if that is a real thing or not, however it doesn’t appear as though it is overheating at the current test level for failure. I will also include hardware components as maybe that will give insight to an issue I don’t see myself. I am using a Corsair Force MP500 M.2 2280 240GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CSSD-F240GBMP500 since I had one laying around I wasn’t using. I tested this with crystaldiskinfo and it appears to be functioning without issue or error. And for Ram I bought and tossed this in Crucial 8GB DDR5 Ram, 4800MHz CL40 High-Speed Laptop RAM, SODIMM 262-pin-CT8G48C40S5, which was also hit with memtest86 with 0 issues shown(I know this doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the issue just mentioning I did that as part of my tests)
Just looking for any assistance or cures to this issue if anyone has found them throughout their mini pc journey. Thank you friends.
For my testing I have my pfsense stripped down to full defaults with only one single Ethernet lan connection to my pc to run continual pings and with the reported thermal sensors not reporting anything above 46degrees Celsius it is still randomly restarting. I then adjusted pfsense setting of Intel speed shift to 90% efficiency to see if it can have an uptime longer than 8 hours. If anyone can suggest anything else that can be simply adjusted in the bios that may help me I would appreciate it. If it involves command line I am not opposed but I don’t really know any commands for filesystems outside of windows. I see a lot of people point toward the PSU being an issue, so I have also ordered another to test. I have thermal paste but I was deterred by a friend from removing the heatsink and case from the cpu side because they could have a certain amount of pressure that I wouldn’t be able to replicate. I am not sure if that is a real thing or not, however it doesn’t appear as though it is overheating at the current test level for failure. I will also include hardware components as maybe that will give insight to an issue I don’t see myself. I am using a Corsair Force MP500 M.2 2280 240GB PCI-Express 3.0 x4 MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CSSD-F240GBMP500 since I had one laying around I wasn’t using. I tested this with crystaldiskinfo and it appears to be functioning without issue or error. And for Ram I bought and tossed this in Crucial 8GB DDR5 Ram, 4800MHz CL40 High-Speed Laptop RAM, SODIMM 262-pin-CT8G48C40S5, which was also hit with memtest86 with 0 issues shown(I know this doesn’t mean it couldn’t be the issue just mentioning I did that as part of my tests)
Just looking for any assistance or cures to this issue if anyone has found them throughout their mini pc journey. Thank you friends.
I purchased 2 Topton n100 barebone units and the seller messaged me reach time to use oem Samsung or Hynix ram. In one unit, I used an 8 GB ddr5 5600 stick and 16 GB ddr5 Patriot 5600 made with Samsung chips in the other. Both units have been running bare metal opnsense for many months without any crashes or random reboots.
I have seen some reports of crucial not working for some people.
Okay thank you for the tip and research experience I will look for a different RAM module to test out, do you have the specific model of either RAM stick you have used without issue?
I used a 8 GB stick of Hynix ram that I purchased from Facebook Marketplace.
The 16 GB stick of ram I purchased from Amazon: Patriot Signature Line DDR5 16GB (1 x 16GB) 5600MHz SODIMM Single - PSD516G560081S : Amazon.ca: Electronics
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Good luck. I hope it works to solve the freezing and rebooting.
For storage, I used a 120 GB SATA3 Kingston SSD for opnsense. It was a spare and NVMe speed would be wasted.
For cooling my Topton n100, I placed a 120 mm fan on top to pull air away from the unit. I connected the fan's 12 volt wires to a USB cable and plugged the USB cable into a 5 volt phone charger. This lower voltage allows the fan to spin around 600 rpm is a virtually silent. Temps, according to the opnsense dashboard, idle around 28 celsius.
It is at almost 24 hours uptime with messing with the speed shift set to 90% conservative. Once the new ram arrives I will swap that in and see what settings it allows. I was going to also put a 120mm fan on there and I have an arctic on standby to go on. I will still figuring out how I wanted to do that. It would be cool if someone made a custom clip to attach the fan to the topton mini pc boxes. I was trying to get pfsense to be able to run for a few days before I moved forward with the rest of my build though. Hopefully it doesn’t have issue with the nvme I provided it was a spare I had as well.
Well I am still waiting on the ram, but with Intel speed shift enabled through pfsense at 90% energy efficiency it has maintained uptime and we are approaching three days. I wonder why this setting is so effective at curbing its issues. Maybe the CPU was ramping up the wattage of the machine too much?
I left the bios settings at stock other than enabling auto boot after a power failure and used opnsense tunables to help reduce power consumption.
Have you tried leaving bios settings "as-is" and using pfsense to reduce power consumption?
I felt like the only thing I changed in the bios is the auto reboot after losing power, however I did go through it a second time to look at options and I don’t think I changed anything, however after doing that and reinstalling a fresh PFSense I ran it with default settings. I did notice however that the speed shift was auto enabled. Is this something that I would have had to enable in bios and I don’t remember? The AI online answer said that pfsense has it enabled by default.
I did test it with a fresh default install of pfsense and it only lasted about 6 hours before it rebooted. I then adjusted the speed shift to 90% efficiency and it lasted almost 3 days before reboot. And after it rebooted today it had rebooted a few times in hours. The temps don’t register above 45 degrees at any given time. I just checked it again and it’s actively booting again.
I wanted to put the new ram in but it keeps pushing back the ship date due to supply chain issues, so I just ordered a Hynix as well and whichever gets here first will be my new test stick.
I have no experience with pfsense on these units as I only tried them with opnsense.
Are there any logs that could help diagnose the issue?
PFsense has some system/general logs. However when the crash occurs there are never any indications on restart in the logs. If you are referring to the boot up process and what it puts into those logs I would have those. I don’t know if anything would be built into those logs that would hint at a hardware or sometype of failure.
I have this unit in my CWWK AL-4L V2.0:
Only Proxmox on this Unit.
Quite performant, and has never thrown an error.
Nice!
I don't use my Topton for anything other than bare metal opnsense with Unbound, Adguard, and Wireguard so my needs are quite minimal. Decided to get 8 GB of Hynix which has worked well for over 2 years.
Yes.
I see much of the discussion around these low-power units involving Router Duties.
My 'router' is an EdgeRouter 4, and it does the job well. Uptime in is years. I'm using AT to T 1G fiber, and I have specifically configured the ER4 to entirely replace the RG (dls-ish!). I have kept the ONT as-is, as replacing it is a whole other can-of-worms.
My n305 effectively replaced a double-handful of old, bastard comps I was trying to Frankenstein back onto functionality.