This video is a bit of a “life happens” review, because my main home server that runs all my router and network tasks suddenly died. With no internet and a house full of services I’ve learned to rely on, I grabbed the Geekom A5 Pro mini PC and turned it into a temporary all-in-one replacement. Over the best part of a month, I ran it as my OPNsense router/firewall, WireGuard VPN, Home Assistant controller, plus a bunch of other containers and services—despite the fact it only has a single 2.5GbE port. The big challenge was networking: one port isn’t how you’d normally do WAN and LAN, so I got creative with a managed switch, VLAN tagging (ID 911), and Proxmox virtual bridges to make that single connection behave like both interfaces. After transplanting the NVMe from my dead Intel-based server into this AMD/Realtek box, it booted straight back into Proxmox and everything came up far more smoothly than you’d expect. Performance genuinely surprised me. Even routing heavy traffic and running multiple VMs/containers, CPU usage never went above about 40%, temps sat in the low-to-mid 50s, and power draw was often around 14W with brief peaks under ~40W. It’s an impractical long-term router setup, sure, but it’s a brilliant example of how capable modern mini PCs can be for self-hosting if you’re willing to learn and experiment.