RoutITX
Introduction
I’ve decided that I want a better router. There are plenty of reasons for this; home routers are, even the more expensive of them, viewed as pretty lacklustre when in the hands of professionals. Sadly, my budget doesn’t allow me to have a nice Juniper or Cisco model and unfortunately I can’t exactly stretch to a nice SOHO Draytek or Zyxel either.
Of course, buying a router would also go against the fun of building my own! 
My plan is to build an ITX-based, fanless, low-power yet relatively powerful router. The OS of choice is currently m0n0wall, which is geared towards embedded systems and will enable me to use a CompactFlash card instead of a mechanical disk.
The benefit to the embedded orientation (over pfSense etc.) means that logs are stored in memory, instead of popping the write-limit on the CF card, allowing me to put it away and forget about it. Which I like. I also like that it will eliminate any form of whine from requiring a mechanical disk.
Hardware
Here’s a list of the hardware that made it into the finished item:
- Jetway J7F4K motherboard
- Silverstone PT-03 ITX case
- DC-DC 60W PSU (included with PT-03)
- CF->IDE adapter and a 256MB CF card
- 512MB DDR2-533
With regards to the motherboard: I was offered something of a ‘bonus’ (from an unnamed colleague) to the tune of < £100. This really made the project financially viable by paying for the board, which was the most expensive part of the project. The motherboard in question is a Jetway J7F4K (or the J7F4K1G2E-LF to give it the full product name) is sold as a fanless, 1.2GHz C7 board.
As a bonus, it also comes with twin Gigabit Ethernet NICs on-board. I don't envision that the CPU could ever muster throughput that saturates this, but at least there's jumbo frame support on the LAN side, and I should easily be able to obtain over 100Mbit with the CPU, making it a useful feature for the future. What's most important is that it actually has two NICs, when many of the low power Mini-ITX boards don't come with any more than a single FastEthernet port.
And once more, here’s the link to Jetway’s specifications.
More to follow.