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. Basic pictures of the case from all angles, etc.
Build
Problems.
Conclusion
Low profile memory needed. Heat when not supported by ACPI OS, etc.