I have used banana pro for several years now as samba server for a sata drive, and pihole/openvpn server. My operating system Is:
ARMBIAN 5.87.190520 nightly Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) 5.1.3-sunxi .
I have tried several stable distributions before the may 5, 2019 nightly build, but all have the same issues.
1) Every few days I will loose network connectivity. The board is on, I can see that, but I can not ssh into it. Even the hdmi console will not respond. Apparently, the system just hangs somewhere.
2) There are times when network is fine, I can ssh, but openvpn server just stops responding. Restarting openvpn server does not do make it work. I have to reboot the system to get everything to work.
So to avoid all that, I have created a cron job to reboot the system every night at 4 am. So far so good.
I am afraid that either my board is failing, or the power supply is failing. I have use this board for 4 years, so I happy to retire it and buy a new board.
I need recommendation to replace banana pro. I have a sata drive that I want to use it as NAS, and also use the board as pihole and vpn server. If the board is powerful, I may use it as apache sever using wordpress software for publishing blogs. Right now I am using Pogoplug V4 for that purpose, and I can retire that also.
I do not need to use it for kodi or video, but an hdmi port would be nice, since I do use it with xfce desktop to do some of my computer science programming and machine learning assignments.
Thank you for any recommendation in advance. By the way my budget is $100 to $150 including a case and microsd card if needed.