Check out ServeTheHome's "Project TinyMiniMicro" on Youtube for a great overview of ultra-small form factor ("1 liter") business PCs.
The big three PC makers each have standardized products in this form factor with (relatively speaking, compared to smaller manufacturers) tons of spare parts available.
Personally I'd go for as big a UPS as I could afford, but I serve some public-facing stuff from my homelab and I live in an area with outdated infrastructure and occasional ice storms. I currently have a small UPS and have been too tired/overwhelmed to set up automated shutdown yet. It's not too hard though, I've done it before. And even without that in place, my small UPS has kept things going thru a bunch of <10 minute outages.
I would never open those types of services to the Internet. Wrap it in a VPN first yeah?
I have this exact model machine as a web app server running Proxmox btw. Works great. I did need to get a genuine power supply for it as it refused to run above 800MHz with a generic!
Currently I have a bastion host running a hardened distro, which establishes a reverse proxy tunnel to its ssh port via my $4/mo VPS using rathole, an excellent reverse proxy utility I switched to from frp.
I also maintain a Tor hidden service pointed at the bastion host's ssh port and another on a different internal host. These are so that I can still get in if the bastion host, my VPS, or certain aspects of networking are down for some reason.
Eventually I will implement port knocking / single packet authorization by deploying fwknop on some or all of these services to further enhance security.
But my hate for Snap runs so deep that I’ve started using Debian w/ GNOME more and more often over the last year or so.
As a Linux Mint user I've seen the writing on the wall and will be switching to Linux Mint Debian Edition next time I reinstall my desktop.
so far not been disappointed by Ugreen
Thanks for posting this. It’s nice that people are working on more accessible ways to do this, every way I’ve done it so far has been pure command line. And while that’s fine, it takes longer to understand and set up for simple installs.
Edit: posted to wrong tab, doh
Good question, I'm not entirely sure as I have never used mesh features per se.
I do currently use a GLi Creta as a wifi extender to a GLi Slate AX, but that's likely not what you're asking about (I believe it's a layer 3 (?) bridge from WWAN to WLAN/LAN). It does work pretty well in this role, all factors considered.
Just wanna put in a good word about GL-iNet routers ... they are more travel- and pro-sumer focused than a lot of what's been mentioned here. They run a proprietary front end on top of OpenWRT, but if you don't like that, most of them have full support in vanilla OpenWRT.
These are definitely more for the tinkerer market, their documentation and firmware can have quirks, but that being said (and as somebody who wouldbe wary at that caveat) I have been using GLi routers with manufacturer firmware as a daily driver for 3+ years and once you get them set up they are very solid.
Might be a good option for the digital nomads among us who need a smaller device which can connect to a host network and then send all traffic over a VPN with very easy setup.
It's not (yet) a good solution, but I suffer with voip.ms, and it is slowly improving.
Just get a used ultra-small form factor PC a la the Tiny, Mini, or Micro series. A higher-end one which is 7 generations old will still absolutely destroy the Pi in terms of performance.
Once I gave up (for now) on doing all this on ARM and switched back to x86, everything got way easier to actually accomplish.