NIC For My NUC

I’m adding a second wired NIC to my Gen5 NUC.  Unfortunately, the Gen5 NUCs only have M.2 slots, not mPCIe slots like the Gen4 NUC had so I had to buy an adapter that converts an M.2 slot into a mPCIe.  This is because there are no M.2 wired NICs available.

If you are wondering why I wanted a second wired NIC in my NUC, it is because I am running VMware on my NUC and I want to separate out some different traffic types.  I am running a virtual firewall so USB passthrough to a USB NIC is not an option in this instance.  If I was running a Windows or standard Linux VM I could probably have gotten away with that.

The only real disadvantage of this is that I loose both M.2 slots because of the size of the converter card and where the cable lands.  This doesn’t bother me too much because I was using a 2.5″ laptop SSD for storage anyways.

Project Box

Project Box

  I bought a metal project box because I knew I would need to drill/cut holes into it for what I need.  What I did was create a paper template from the circuit board I wanted to mount into the box.  I did this by taping it to the circuit board a...