A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

Mini ITX Shuffle

Recently, even with my current lack of money I've been ogling an Intel mini ITX board at newegg.com. The board has an Atom 330 embedded as well as a 100/1000 NIC.

The reason that I bring this up is that I watched an episode of Hak5 which talked about pfSense a freeBSD based firewall//router OS (a fork of M0n0wall). I've used pfSense before and found it to be awesome I've just never had the hardware to use it as a permanent solution. However now I think I have the perfect set of hardware.

For a while I've been planning to upgrade the motherboard//proc on my file server which is running FreeNAS another freeBSD based OS (also based off of M0n0wall) meant for network attached storage systems. The board that the fileserver is running on now is a JetWay VIA C7 mini ITX board which does it's duty decently well. The JetWay board has dual-gigabit NIC's which is exactly what I'd like to use for a router box. So the plan is that once I've got the money for doing all this I'll be buying the Intel Atom 330 mini ITX board and replacing the JetWay board in my fileserver with the intel board while using the JetWay board for the router.

I figure it will work well enough because for the router I'll need at least 2 NIC's (which the JetWay has) and for the fileserver I'll only really need the one NIC. Either way it's a win-win situation, my fileserver gets a little beefier while I get guts for a Router!