On 17/11/06, Joe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Steve Williams wrote:
> This is a light duty firewall, going on a DSL line (2.5 M). I will be
> running spamd and perhaps squid (transparant caching web proxy), so the
> demands will not be much on the hardware.
>
> I'd like a (modern) motherboard that "just works". Audio/video is
> completely irrelevant (it will be running headless). It seems like most
> motherboards come with onboard ethernet, and it would be nice if that
> worked.
>
> I am processor agnostic. We have a mix of Intel & AMD (and one sparc64)
> at work.
>
> What is a solid motherboard where the onboard ethernet will "just work",
> with a disk controller that will "just work". I don't really need RAID,
> but if it had it & I could use it, I likely would.
>
> Thanks for any input.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve Williams
VIA ITX boards work great.
The ones with the C7 CPU are great, fast, and low power.
I'd suggest not to go with VIA Epia boards, unless you want to pay 3
times the price of the actual stuff you are buying. Same thing goes
for Soekris boards.
ASUS Terminator C3 barebone includes a Fast Ethernet vr(4) networking
card, floppy drive, CD-ROM and onboard VIA C3 Samuel 2 800MHz (133MHz
FSB) processor (equivalent to about 600MHz Intel processors, because
Samuel 2 FPU runs at 50% of the clock speed). This Terminator C3
barebone works pretty good for me on OpenBSD [0] [1], and now costs
less than 100 USD delivered from newegg.com [2]. We've recently had a
discussion on this at undeadly [3].
If you think that 133MHz FSB and FPU @ 50% clock speed is too slow,
then you could try some of the PC CHIPS motherboards which already
include an embedded processor like AMD Geode NX [4] or VIA C7 Esther
[5].
The fastest and cheapest of all of these today would be PC CHIPS V21G
motherboard [6] [7], which includes a VIA C7 (400MHz FSB) processor
and accepts DDR2-533 memory, but costs only 70 USD or thereabouts. (If
anyone has a dmesg from this machine, please, share it with us.) I'm
not sure which exact model of the processor this board comes with
(neither PC Chips nor the sellers of their products say anything about
the exact model of VIA C7), but the slowest VIA C7 processor that is
available features a wholly 1,5GHz [5] and random number generators
(hello crypto), so I bet V21G would be a very overpowered firewall,
specifically, with DDR2-533 memory as opposed to DDR266 or even
regular SDRAM that is offered in other models of this 'embedded pc'
category. :)
P.S. If anyone does end up buying a PC CHIPS V21G board, please, do
share a dmesg with us. :)
P.P.S. I really wish ASUS would release a Terminator C7 barebone. :)
Cheers,
Constantine.
[0] http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/openbsd/2005-03/2801.html
(Terminator C3 dmesg)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Asus-Computer-C3-FDD-52X-TERMINATOR/dp/B0007KQLFQ
[2] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16856110056
[3] http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20061115152127&pid=42
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Geode#Geode_NX
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_C7#Processor_table
[6] http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=pc+chips+v21g
[7] http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/Products/ProductsDetail.aspx?DetailID=384
