Woohoo! After a few weekends of fiddling, I have a funky diskless flash-based BSD box. Using an ASUS TUSL mobo with integrated everything, and a DiskOnModule 32Mb flashdisk, I can do the whole thing with no cards or disks. I currently have a VIA C3 Ezra for the CPU, and the plan is to get it to be fanless, too. The ‘disk’ currently has support for all the nice FreeBSD networking features (IP firewall, bridging, packet-shaping, IPv6, VLANs, filtering etc), plus higher-level routing (BGP4, OSPF and RIPv2, via zebra), an X server to connect to another box via XDMCP, a thttpd web server that could be used for web-based admin, and enough local CLI stuff to alter the config, change routes etc. There’s still 13Mb left on the flash, too! Next up is SNMP support, VRRP, and (with luck) some sort of console RDP or VNC client, for when you don’t want to deal with xdm.
Use a board like the Advantech 5823, and get a firewall/router/shaper in the space of a 3.5″ disk. Do it with the dinkyFreetech P6F139 board I mentioned back in January, and get a rather nice little X Terminal, with scope for mounting NFS drives and doing local processing.
on Apr 13th, 2002 at 8:27 pm
I was thinking about a C3 for my diskless machine. It has been fanless with a celeron 300A for a while, then for the last 2 weeks it has had a celeron 700. I pushed the boat out today and got one of those new 0.13micron Celeron 1.2GHz processors. Very nice it is too with its 256k cache, it can’t quite manage running flat-out with no fan using the Intel heatsink, but derate the fan to 5V and it’s silent and the slow fan seems to keep it a lot cooler than my Athlon machine with its rocket fan.
Derate it to 66MHz FSB (800MHz core) and it easily runs fanless, shame my motherboard won’t let me fiddle with the bus without upsetting PCI…
on Apr 13th, 2002 at 9:57 pm
The C3 really is a bit of a dog - FP performance is worse than a 500Mhz K6-2 for the 866Mhz C3 Ezra, and integer isn’t much better… It’s only real claim to fame is the low-power thing (and the odd biblical names), although mine seems to warm up pretty quickly - I haven’t experimented with different heatsinks and thermal compound yet though. An underclocked Tualatin Celeron and something like the Zalman Flower Cooler might be a better option.