This is not related to ham radio, but I know a number of folks here will find it interesting....
I have a lot of FreeBSD based routers in my network (and the networks I manage). Some of the systems also function as firewalls, mail servers, spam filters, web servers, file servers, DNS servers, etc...
However, a number of them function strictly in a networking capacity (routing, firewall, DNS, DHCP). For this, I am still using full PCs because this is what I have lying around. By the way, for many, many years the MAIN ROUTER/GATEWAY, handling two (2) 3 megabit circuits was running FreeBSD 4.2 on a - yes, get this - a Pentium 1, 90mHz !!! That is how efficiently FreeBSD handles routing. There was a complex firewall configuration as well (which every packet went through), and the same system was the main DNS server for 20 or so domains.
Anyway, I'm trying to cut down on the power consumption (gee, sounds like a familiar theme) and size of the router-only systems...when I figured I'd try the Mini ITX format motherboards. VERY small, yet full functionality. These have been around for a couple of years. Known for low power consumption, also.
So, for $35.00 (Ebay) I got a Jetway 7F4K series board (with 2 10/100/1000 lan ports!), Via C7 1.2gHz processor which uses only *7 watts of power*. The board is fanless, and consumes very little power. Added 1 gig of memory ($24.00)and an 8 gig USB flash drive (for booting FreeBSD). The board has all kinds of interfaces for drives, etc. as well.
Software Configuration:
I copied (using a copy utility called pax) an existing FreeBSD 7.0 installation from a hard drive to the flash drive (and put a boot block on the flash drive as well - all this is very easy to do in FreeBSD)... made a few *minor* configuration changes to support a read-only boot device (you CANNOT use a flash disk as a "normal" system disk - the numerous writes will destroy the device over time).
FreeBSD is very smart - figuring out that the boot disk was read-only, and creating a memory resident /var and /tmp directory without me doing anything at all !
So, boot from the flash - and violla ! A diskless, low-power, SMALL, high-performance, fully-functional FreeBSD system, routing packets at full speed between the built-in interfaces.
Here's a picture of the JS router (the board is just sitting on a box. You can see the size as compared to the standard ATX power supply I hooked up. Obviously, I need to get or build a smaller power supply !! No keyboard or monitor need be connected - everything can be managed remotely using telnet or ssh.
