First things first, below you can see all hardware components I purchased. It is based on the Atom Cedar Trail.
All components:
| SolidLogic Atom M350 Mini-ITX System | Atom-M350v1 | |
| Mainboard | ||
| 1 x Jetway NF9D-2550 Dual Core Atom Mini-ITX Motherboard | NF9D-2550 | |
| Case | ||
| 1 x M350 Universal Mini-ITX Case | M350 | |
| Daughterboard | ||
| 1 x Jetway 3x 1Gb Intel LAN Module | AD3INLANG | |
| Memory | ||
| 1 x Transcend SO-DIMM DDR3 1333 Memory 2GB | JM1333KSU-2G | |
| DC-DC Power Converter | ||
| 1 x PicoPSU-80 DC-DC Power Converter, 80 W | picoPSU-80 | |
| AC Adapter (brick) | ||
| 1 x Power Adapter DC 12 V, 80 W Level 5 (EU Power Cord Included) | PW-12V6A7-L5 | |
| Mounting | ||
| 1 x M350 Wall Mounting Brackets | MB-M350 | |
| Case Fans | ||
| 1 x Replacement Vapo-Bearing Cooling Fan, 40x40x20 (with mounting screws) |
I assembled all parts to one neat little mini itx SFF gateway with 5 gigabit ethernet ports (pictures see below).
- 3xIntel 82541GI
- 2xRTL8111/8168B
As an operating system I installed CentOS 6.3 running kernel 2.6.32-279.19.1.el6.x86_64. I had no issues with the Intel NICS as the drivers shipped with the kernel already were compatible.
I did have an issue with the Realtek NICs. They were not recognized by that kernel. As a resolution I installed the drivers from the ELRepo project (Thanks!):
rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-5.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
yum install kmod-r8168
After this little issue, I had no other issues with the hardware and OS combination. Please note that I am running this as a headless box, so I did not test any fancy graphics card functions (onboard on the Atom).
The power consumption for this setup which I measured is:
- 22-24 W idle
- 28 W cpu all cores 100% loaded
I added an additional FAN in the case, but you do not really need this. The motherboard/cpu is fanless, the cpu will run idle at an average temperature of 55° with an ambient temperature being about 22°.
However, I configured the FAN with smartfan in BIOS, so that it will keep the cpu lower than 50° at all times.
Things I will be configuring on this box, I will probably update this blog with all topics.
- Default iptables/bridging config (already done)
- DNS with bind (caching and local resolving)
- DHCP with dhcpd (already done)
- Transparant caching proxy with Squid
- Dynamic dns update from dhcp
- Nagios monitoring with check_mk (already done)
- Intrusion detection, probably with Snort
- Radius server for external Cisco access point
- Ddclient for dynamic DNS (already done)
- OpenVPN
- .... and other things that come to my mind :)
Details and pictures:
lspci -nn
00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx DRAM Controller [8086:0bf3] (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation Atom Processor D2xxx/N2xxx Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0be2] (rev 09)
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:27d8] (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 [8086:27d0] (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 2 [8086:27d2] (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 3 [8086:27d4] (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 4 [8086:27d6] (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 [8086:27c8] (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 [8086:27c9] (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 [8086:27ca] (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 [8086:27cb] (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller [8086:27cc] (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge [8086:2448] (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation NM10 Family LPC Controller [8086:27bc] (rev 02)
00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH7 Family SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [8086:27c1] (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller [8086:27da] (rev 02)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 06)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 06)
04:00.0 SATA controller [0106]: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1062 Serial ATA Controller [1b21:0612] (rev 01)
05:04.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller [8086:1076] (rev 05)
05:06.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller [8086:1076] (rev 05)
05:07.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82541GI Gigabit Ethernet Controller [8086:1076] (rev 05)
