Dual GbE Atom board?

[watercooled]

Are there any reasonably-priced dual gigabit NIC Atom boards available, preferable Pineview or an N270 because of the lower power draw. In fact it doesn't even have to be an Atom board - if there are any VIA Nano or similar boards they'd be great too - just something around that spec. Not looking to spend more than £100 if possible. Alternatively a pre-built system would probably be a better choice as they're usually smaller, something like this would be ideal but it's a little expensive...

[alsenior]

Supermicro do this board. more than £100 thought but does have proper gbe adapters and would make a fantastic base for a file server
http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...7SPA.cfm?typ=H
cheapest i found it was here
http://www.codemicro.com/store/produ...AH/Refurbished

[watercooled]

Yeah that board looks ideal - Intel NICs too! Do you know anywhere else to buy it from - that's a US shop and the shipping is a bit expensive.

[alsenior]

might be an idea to give boston.co.uk a ring. they deal pretty much exclusively with super micro stuff

[watercooled]

Will do, thanks.

[alsenior]

stumbled across this when shopping for mums computer

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Tyan-...s-Mini-ITX-VGA

[scaryjim]

Another option would be to look for an appropriate Jetway motherboard that takes add on modules and then grab a triple Gb lan add on board. Linitx usually have a good range of compatible boards, with both Atom and VIA processor options...

[Agent]

Just thought I'd give a little bump and offer what I've found out so far.

I'm looking to build a pfsense based firewall / network thingie myself and have had the same issue. That little box you've linked at the top is perfect, but over priced
I looked into modding the revo's mini PCIE slot, but I can only find wireless cards that go in it, and nothing with a ethernet socket (I would have drilled a hole in the side and fitting a new port).

I've given up on a small, reasonably priced dual network system now and I'm just going to build one myself with the following:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...2-CPU-On-Board - This has a PCI slot on it, so I can fit a gigbit network card in there. It has quite a low power draw, and is a standard mini-ITX.

A picoPSU like the ones on: http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/...pplies_95.html

Maybe a SSD. It only needs to be small.

OS? Well I was going for pure pfsense to start with. Now I'm considering Windows server with pfsense running in a VM managing the entire network still. The reason? There are quite a few Windows apps I use, and it seems silly to waste all the power of the system on something as lightweight as pfsense. Even if I only set it up as a NAS / download box, it's something more.

I'm not sure what the performance is going to be like for the VM given that the Atom doesn't have any of the VT extensions, but it should be perfectly useable. I'm more worried about any latency issues to be honest.

Case: any cheapo mini ITX one - it'll be hidden away anyway, so looks don't matter.
DDR2 RAM, so cheap enough.

[Agent]

Scratch that mobo, just found this one: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200878

2 PCI and one PCI express (for multi gigabit goodness!). Gives a lot more expandability. Plus it's a newer CPU http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=35641,43098,

I'm sold

edit - ah dam, didn't realise its MATX. I'm thinking of going ITX based. This still looks like it'll fit the job due to the PCI-E as opposed to normal PCI : http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200893

Still, I wonder what the power draw is like on it. I don't mind going MATX if it's about the same.

[watercooled]

I don't understand why dual-NIC Atom boards are so rare with it being such an ideal firewall platform. There's a list of all known Pineview Atom boards here if you're interested. I was planning to run something like Untangle or Astaro myself, hence the need for a more powerful platform. For something like pfSesne or m0n0wall an ALIX board should be able to do Fast Ethernet at close to wire speed. Here's a good distributor of these boards/accessories: http://www.msdist.co.uk/catalogue_PCEnginesALIX.php

[Agent]

Untangle looks nice, but I'm really after the ability to monitor users to a good level. Can't seem to anything like this in Untangle from reading about?

[vrykyl]

Damn - i really really really wish I'd come across that Supermicro mitx atom board when I was building my media pc / home server - i spent ages looking for a sub-£150 board with more than 3 sata ports... ended up with an asus one which has 4 (but sadly limited raid options - 0 or 1 only)

Board I bought - http://uk.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=iHWm73RqE6MCmCtw

Might be of interest to you purely because it has its own built in psu - you just plug what looks like a latop brick directly into the back IO of the motherboard.

[watercooled]

It depends how you want to monitor theme exactly - Untangle can monitor things like bandwidth usage and denied pages visited etc and integrates with your domain controller you you can see results for usernames rather than IPs. There's a link to a webinar on the home page which covers lots of the features. One thing I noticed with Untangle why I tested it was it takes aaaaages to boot, Astaro does seem a fair bit quicker to boot if that's important to you and the fully-featured home version is free for personal use. If you have a spare PC you could download a few OSes and see what you think, what I did was connect the PC to my router then connect a laptop the other Ethernet port so it didn't interrupt the whole network while I was trying them out.