This machine was already sitting in the rack but because it is a tower server, it was taking up almost 5U. I was using it as a pfSense hardware firewall.

A hardware firewall has very few requirements. At least two network interfaces are a must and some kind of visual output is probably needed for first time installation (assuming you cannot just use an embedded disk image install, as it did not work for me at all). Because it is 1U, as much as possible must be on the motherboard as there is only a single riser card expansion slot. Having an optical drive at hand may be useful but hopefully not necessary – I borrowed one from another machine for first time installation again because I couldn’t get any kind of embedded install to actually boot. You may be able to get a board with no VGA output and just use a temporary graphics card in the same way but some machines may not boot after the graphics card has been removed.

The motherboard I used was an Asus M3N WS. Asus are the best motherboard manufacturer by far and have been for quite a few years. Every time I use something else I immediately regret it. A few years ago, there were a lot of motherboards with two network interfaces but now there seem to be almost none. Desktop users just don’t need them (even though I’m using the second NIC on an Asus Striker Extreme in my main desktop computer to bridge my Xbox 360 to the Internet, as my dirt cheap but excellent ZyXEL GS-105A 5-port gigabit switch is in use by another server for now). This is an AM2+ motherboard but performance isn’t an issue so I went for the cheapest Athlon 64 I could find, a LE-1640 2.7GHz single core.

For a case, I went with an X-Case RM 100S. This is a rack mount (RM) case, 1U (100) and is the short version (S). I had previously used a RM 206LP as an excellent 2U MythTV server with space for 5 to 7 low-profile expansion cards. However, as always with X-Case, they are relatively cheap and have excellent ideas but they are executed incredibly poorly. Drills and drill-bits that can cut through metal will be required, as will screws and screw drivers of various sizes.

The good idea, with the 206LP is to offer many low-profile expansion card slots rather than just 2 riser cards. In something like a MythTV server which may require many expansion cards for TV tuners, this is a must and very few other companies offer low profile 2U servers at all. Other ones I could find were archaic and expensive, based around things like old AT motherboards. The problem for the 206LP was that fitting an ATX power supply into it that feeds air in from one end and blows it out the other is very difficult. I managed to find a decent PSU but immediately had to void its warranty to turn the fans around inside and also had to move the 4 internal case fans further back to fit it in. Luckily, I wasn’t using a full size ATX motherboard at the time (I was using an ATX board that only used 6 screws, not a micro ATX).

The 100S, however, has some different problems. Firstly, it is designed around a different PSU to the one that ships with it. This new PSU does not actually screw into the case properly. Secondly, the airflow is complete nonsense. They have 3 40mm fans where the PSU should be and a PSU where the fans should be. In a rack, all air should flow from the front, over the components and to the back. They claimed that the PSU didn’t fit at the back but as soon as those fans were removed, it had plenty of space. The PSU does not come with an 8-pin 12V supply like the video shows but to be honest I wouldn’t expect that from a 250W power supply in the first place and I’m surprised the one in the video had one. More of an issue is that the main 20/24 pin power supply is incredibly short and will probably not reach wherever it needs to get to on your motherboard regardless of placement, particularly as in a 1U case it cannot actually go over anything and must go around. I used a 20 to 24 pin adapter that I just happened to have (from some previous false advertising where a PSU was labelled as 20 but was actually 24, so I bought it for nothing).

X-Case also seems to delight in telling you that your case needs no rails but then not providing any screws that will hold it in place, so it is currently just sitting at the bottom of my rack not actually attached.

These fans could have been placed near the CPU on this particular motherboard and a passive cooler used. Just make sure the fins face the right way, which means moving the fans anyway in this case. However, I did not know this when I bought the thing, so I got an active cooler. The Dynatron A48G did blow out very nicely over the northbridge though and lined up perfectly.

For storage, had intended to use the Lycom UB-109 but I grossly overestimated the size of a 1U server so I could have cut this in half but instead I decided to just use the rear USB bracket that came with the motherboard instead. A 256MB thumb drive is fine for pfSense but other servers may need more. I bought an 8GiB just because it was almost the same price. Either way, just remember to disable swap space in the installation to avoid frequent writes. Swap is not needed if you have enough memory and the 1GiB of corsair 800 MHz DDR2 I had lying around was plenty.

If you are going to use a USB drive to boot an operating system, you should probably get a drive with a high read speed. The drive I am using currently takes several minutes just to load the ramdisk of FreeBSD 7 (pfSense is based on FreeBSD).

Total cost:
X-Case RM 100S – £79.00
AMD Athlon 64 LE-1640 – £23.38
Asus M3N WS – £54.70
Dynatron A48G – £30.00

Add in the cost of the USB thumb drive and cheap stick of memory to round it up to £200.

In this particular case, it would probably be better to cut off the metal by the fans entirely and drill a new hole so that the fans can be mounted closer to the CPU and memory. However, I am lazy.

The model number is HYMP125F72CP8N3-Y5