Firewall (the continuing saga of)
My firewall has been sitting untouched for a good 2 weeks now. Some other projects came up, so I had to put this aside for a little while. But here’s where I’m at.
Everything is assembled and seems to be working great. I did make 1 goof on the hardware. The picoPSU I purchased had 24 pins instead of the 20 pins that I needed. Since I have another use for the 24 pin, I just replaced the 150 watt PSU with the 20 pin 120 watt one. Here’s the final parts list of what I have running:
- Jetway NF76-N1GL-LF- $140
- AD3RTLANG – Jetway 3 x Gigabit LAN Daughter board – $48
- picoPSU-120 + 102W Adapter Power Kit – $65
- M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure – $40
- 4GB 40 pin Embedded Disk Card 4000 – $58
- 2GB DDR2 Memory – $28
I’m now currently trying to build my own copy of Vyatta. Basically, I noticed that there were some bugfixes for the Via Nano, as well as support for it’s RNG added in the 2.6.31 kernel. I’m attempting to build Vyatta’s jenner branch with the newer kernel.
Hopefully next week I will have time to start tinkering with my custom Vyatta build again.
Hi,
I am planning to buy this exact motherboard. Have you measured its power consumption by any chance? Also, how hot does it get since it only has passive cooling? Thanks, Karl
I did do some very quick measurements with my Kill-A-Watt when I put this together. It was 21 watts during boot, and 17 watts when idle running vyatta. I haven’t done any testing beyond that.
As for heat, I didn’t put any fans in the case yet. I never noticed any levels of heat that I felt uncomfortable with. That being said, I haven’t really taxed that system yet, and I do have some 40mm fans lying around just in case.
The case came with a mounting bracket for 2 fans, and you can add a 2nd if you want. I purchased the extra fan bracket just in case when I was putting the system together.
If you don’t need to make a purchase right way, and don’t need the hardware encryption, Intel’s Pine Trail platform should be out really soon (finally). I’m hoping to build myself a home server with one of those.
Sorry, i was wrong about the power consumption. It used 21 watts when booting, 17 watts when idle!
I’m going to correct my comment above as well.
Thanks for letting me know. You are right, Pine Trail based motherboards do look very promising. I didn’t realize they are almost out. I will probably wait for them.
Karl