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 router. And unfortunately, I can’t exactly stretch to a nice SOHO Draytek or Zyxel either.

Well.. Perhaps I could, but then that would just defeat the point in having a project, right? ;)

My plan is to build an ITX-based, fanless, low-power yet powerful router. The OS of choice is currently m0n0wall, but this may-well be change to pfSense, IPCop or whatever else is hot(ter) at the time. Because of this uncertainty (and because of the throughput demons) there is a solid requirement for x86 hardware here.

At present, I quite like m0n0wall’s no-nonsense approach to features and setup. It’s worked damned-well for me so far, and the new 1.3 release is highly-anticipated to use FreeBSD 6. Which is always good, as until now, this has been one of a few reasons to pick pfSense over m0n0wall.

It helps my ’silent’ requirement, that m0n0wall is also geared towards embedded systems, and thus will allow me to use a CF card instead of a HDD. This basically means that it’ll logs 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. :)

Hardware
To begin with, we need a shopping list:

  • Powerful, fanless Mini ITX board. Twin Ethernet or more.
  • A small, minimalistic, inexpensive ITX case.
  • Low-power (<80w) DC-DC PSU, with brick.
  • CF->IDE adapter and CF card (>128MB)
  • Suitable memory, 512-1024MB of.
  • Optional: A decent ADSL2+ modem, capable of Annex M.

Motherboard/CPU
I was offered something of a ‘bonus’ from an unnamed colleague recently, to the tune of < £100. So I picked this: a Jetway J7F4K (or J7F4K1G2E-LF to give it the full product name), which is sold as a fully-fanless 1.2GHz C7 board. As a bonus, it also comes with twin GigE NICs on-board.

Jetway J7F4K, looking down

Jetway J7F4K, rear panel

Link to specifications.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of DDR2 ownership (yes, yes, I know) I’ve not yet been able to power the board up, but given that 512MB of the correct memory can be had for very little, it shouldn’t be long before I’m able to do this.

This as far as I’ve got so far. I’ll update as and when I purchase new hardware. Any comments/suggestions are welcome. :)