Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:49:04 -0700 From: George Hartzell <hartzell@alerce.com> To: John Almberg <jalmberg@identry.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Compact Freebsd 'appliance' Message-ID: <19003.49536.836196.347170@already.dhcp.gene.com> In-Reply-To: <94A1EEFE-A341-41C8-A63E-4F9EC1C75670@identry.com> References: <94A1EEFE-A341-41C8-A63E-4F9EC1C75670@identry.com>
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John Almberg writes: > I have a client who has an application that he wants to deploy in his > customer's offices as a headless 'appliance'. Basically, just a black > box that you can plug into a Lan, turn it on, and it runs. No floppy > disk or CD, no monitor/keyboard, just remotely managed. > > This application won't store any critical data, so it doesn't need > redundancy. It just needs to be reasonably reliable, compact, and quiet. > > My first recommendation was to use a Mac Mini, but that excellent bit > of hardware was deemed 'not professional enough'. So now I am looking > for a compact pc that can run FreeBSD, of course. I think it probably > just needs a power supply, tiny motherboard with onboard ethernet, > usb, etc., and hard drive. > > If anyone has a recommendation (or if their are any vendors lurking), > please shoot me an email off list. I'll compile a list of > recommendations and post it all at once, in case anyone else is > interested in this. I have a couple of Via Artigo a2000 boxes, one running FreeBSD-STABLE (post 7.2) and the other running FreeNAS. Both work well. I've seen posts from one fellow who's tracking a bug with the vge interface under very heavy load, but both of mine stream music and do Time Machine backups via netatalk without any trouble. Logic Supply has a custom FreeNAS build that recognizes the disks as SATA and that adds support for Gb ethernet to the NIC (rolling in changes from -STABLE to the 6.x series on which the stable FreeNAS is based). http://www.logicsupply.com/blog/2009/05/11/custom-a2000-freenas-image/ They're not the cheapest place to buy the box, but they're close and they do good support (I'm just a happy customer and I helped with the FreeNAS image, no other association). They're not Living Room quiet, but they're about as unobtrusive as you can get in a little box w/out going fanless. g.
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