I’ve been watching the responses to this, and been surprised there’s been no mention of ARM hardware (that I’ve noticed). I have a Raspberry Pi 4 with a built in battery and UPS that currently has an uptime of something like 6 months. It’s certainly small enough. It’s cheap enough by a factor of 10. It has 256GB of storage via an SD card that cost $20 or so. It’s silent. The battery will keep it alive for roughly 4 hours, which is more UPS capability than any of my other hardware…
The main issue is that the UPS HAT doesn’t (or didn’t last spring, when I was figuring out the pieces) work under OpenBSD, so I’m running the Raspberry Pi OS lite on it (which is Debian-based). But an external UPS is probably easier to maintain long-term anyhow (though not as cute). What am I missing? Not reliable enough? Or is it the difficulty installing OpenBSD (which has bit me more than once on ARM hardware) that’s the issue? Or are these computers, much more powerful than the 386/16 I first put on the Internet running OpenBSD in the late 1990s, not up to your needs? -DaveP On Sat, Dec 13, 2025, at 14:06, [email protected] wrote: > Hi all, > > I am looking for 2 recommendations for a very reliable mini PC/server, > to run openBSD on, with very limited physical access. > > criteria for computer 1: > - $1200 ballpark > - very little/no noise > - small form factor (say 15 cm x 15 cm x 15 cm) > - low power consumption > - no high performance requirement (can be slow CPU / ram / write) > - 24/7 run with max reliability > - integrated UPS, remote bios management would be a huge plus, though I > can add that separately > - no high storage requirement > > > > criteria for computer 2: > - all the same except I need 2 TB storage, and price can go up to $1500 > (to accommodate for the storage cost) > > > I have been pretty unsuccessful so far. I bought a new Asus PN42, but > it died on me after about a year. It is a fanless design, the SSD died > on me (probably overheat). After SSD replacement, I actually added a > fan, and it died again (I don't know why yet). > > Have I just been unlucky with the PN42, and I should give it a second > chance? Any other recommendation? > > Thanks!
