Nothing crazy to say. It's give me internet but I hate the admin panel (not responsive and intuitive). It's one of the reason why I decided to buy a cudy router.

This router is very interesting for the following reasons :

• Nice specs and affordable (~ 50 euros)
• Possibility to flash it and install OpenWRT (it's what I did)

OpenWRT is a very powerful, intuitive and responsive open source router's firmware. Futhermore, as it's not the original cudy firmware, and has a very reactive community, I will be able to use it for many many years and take advantage of frequent update. By then, it is very likely that the commercial firmware will no longer be maintained.

On this router I installed :

• Wireguard (open source VPN). Allows me to connect to my LAN from everywhere
• Dynamic DNS

This is a tiny but powerful computer. For a home server, he has a lots of highlights :

• Affordable.
• Good techs (8 giga memory, 2,0 GHz quad-core).
• Very low energy consumption. It's perfect for a 24/24 running.
• Possibility to put an NVMe.
• Bonus: a very reactive and helpful community !

Of course, some limitations are presents :

• The raspi 5 is generally hot (around 50 ° in idle with the official case and fan).
• No sata connection, so impossible to do a real raid (to my knowledge).
• Can be limited for hard calculation requirement (video encoding, game server, lot a users at the same time).
• Although he has 4 USB ports, I can't put a fourth ssd (apparently no enough power).
• Not really modulable : impossible to add a new cpu, memory etc. For a long term perspective it can be annous.

Also some people prefer add more money (sometimes not so much more) to buy a more powerful server : mini pc like N100 or old mac mini. But finally each options has pro and cons !

However, I'm really happy with this raspberry 5. You can check here what I'm hosting on it.

Boot SSD with Debian (very stable OS for a server). I'm not booting on Debian with an SD card anymore. Indeed, I prefer to boot from an SSD, which can support much better I/O. On this SSD I have :

• Debian
• Nginx
• Prosody
• Coturn
• Docker

I can't connect it (apparently not enough power with the already tree connected SSD, but in the futur, I could add a powered usb hub). This SSD will be used to make a copy regulary of SSD1. Then, if SSD1 is down, raspi can boot on SS2.

This is where I store all my data that I want to save for the long term (pictures, files, audiobooks, etc.), as well as my Docker containers and images:

• Audiobookshelf
• Dokuwiki
• Homepage
• Mirotalk
• Nextcloud
• Paperless
• Speedtest

It's a backup of SSD3. I did a cronjob with rsync each day at midnight to backup files from SSD3. Sometimes, when I suppose that i don't need old backup anymore, I manually run a rsync with deletion to free space (only files still present in SSD3 are still saved in SS4).

• Connected to wireguard VPN.
• I save some important folders in SSD3 with a rsync.

• I regularly do a backup of my smartphone (with FolderSync app) in the nextcloud folder in SSD3.
• Connected to wireguard VPN.