The goal was rather simple, take my infinitely useful FreeBSD box and scale it down to more practical metrics. Less space, less energy, no noise. The tool for the job: 10 years of technological progress.

Well, I’m not sure if that was the goal or the excuse, sometimes one simply gets an itch. An urge to integrate new hardware and drag old and reliable but bulky and power hungry hardware to the curb.

Maybe I’m being too specific in the details to label this as a recurring rite… but a good intro is a good intro, I’m sticking with it.

Requirements

I had enough specifics in mind that I’m still a little surprised I was able to satisfy every quirky demand. I wanted an Atom based system for the ideal balance of performance and efficiency. I wanted the system to be as ridiculously compact as 2012 technology would allow.

My first thought was the Asus Eee Box. Their size and cost would have been ideal, but contradicting my small form factor requirement was the desire to migrate my existing mirrored 3.5″ tera-byte drives.

Replacing my storage wouldn’t have been a deal breaker, but as I use the FreeBSD box as my gateway, dual high quality NICs was a must.

What started as a few innocent, curiosity driven Google queries quickly escalated into incurable gadget lust when I stumbled on a Mini-ITX board that looked perfect for the task at hand…

Wait, what’s this? A Mini-ITX case that can hold six (six!) 3.5″ drives and an SSD?!

…and it still maintains a sleek minimalistic design?

…also… silent?

These are some of my favourite attributes… I can’t stop now!

The toys for the job

• Super Micro X7SPA-H-D525
• A pair of 2 GB Kingston KVR800D3S8S6/2G modules
• Fractal Design Array R2 Mini ITX NAS Case
• An Intel 311 Series 20 GB SSD, SSDSA2VP020G201, for the OS – just because.

Results

Two weeks impatiently awaiting the arrival of my backordered board from NCIX (everything else was in stock), some quick assembly, hours of migration work and endless compiling later…

Inferno is now replaced, upgraded to FreeBSD 9.0 and back to his regular duties (including hosting this very site). Everything is running stable and I couldn’t be happier with the difference in power consumption!

The Athlon Thunderbird 850 MHz system this replaced loaded my UPS to 17% of its capacity. This system… Only 2%! Run time estimates on battery backup have gone from just over an hour to over four hours! This kind of difference in power consumption alone probably justifies the exercise. If nothing else, I can now just play the “going green” card.

Even a lowly Atom runs circles around the ancient ol’ T-Bird. All else being equal, how can you go wrong with more clock speed, an extra core and Hyper-threading?

To summarize: everything went according to my diabolical plan. Let’s see if I can run on this for the next decade.

I’m now back to my regular ol’ routine, just finished a week long “staycation.” So other than spend quality time with the family, what does a system administrator who doesn’t have to go to work for a week do with his time? Pull some CAT5 and clean up my home network, of course!

Inferno, my FreeBSD home gateway, file, web and everything else server has been irritating me with its typical PC fan whirring for too long. It was high time to uproot the beast from its cozy spot on my office floor, where it sat for nearly eight years and drag it to the basement and finally bring tranquility to my office.

This involved running six new cables from my electrical/laundry room to its new home in the basement’s spare bedroom. One Ethernet run to its LAN interface, one for its WiFi interface (I keep WiFi access to my network on a separate segment), one for my recently acquired Xerox Phaser 8400 printer and one spare for future use. I also needed two RG-6 runs, one for the cable modem which now sits downstairs and one for an old spare CRT TV as per the wife’s request.

After a long day of running and terminating cable and dragging equipment around, I ran into one snag: the NIC for the WiFi segment of my network was not seeing my piece of junk Tranzeo AP. I mistakingly saved this AP from AirSurfer’s dumpster several years ago and have been looking for an excuse to get rid of it ever since. After testing the cable run to the opposite side of the basement where the AP resides, I determined all was well and the Tranzeo pile of garbage was the worthy owner of the blame.

Upon hearing my tales of woe and coming to terms with what this meant for her iPod touch web-surfing habit, Jessie was quick to suggest we give the Tranzeo AP the fate it deserves and replace it with a far more capable AirPort Extreme. Who was I to argue? The Airport has been configured in bridge mode as I still intend to leave the routing duties to Inferno.

In my twisted reality, the aging beige Antec case in combination with the old 19″ CRT I dug up, alongside the Phaser, plain old Fujitsu keyboard and ancient desk (also saved from AirSurfer’s dumpster years ago) give the corner an almost retro-computing look. Somehow I find the whole setup appealing in contrast to my shinier, sleeker, far more modern and most importantly far quieter collection of Apple desktops upstairs.

Like every other Maxtor I’ve deployed in the last several years, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) 120 GB drive in this server was throwing multiple read errors and threatening to fail at any moment.

As opposed to waiting for its imminent death, I decided it was time to do some upgrades.

Not wanting to invest in a PATA drive in 2008, I added a Promise SATA300 TX2 SATA PCI controller card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB (ST3750330AS)

No hardware upgrade is ever complete without the complementing software upgrade. During the procedure I also opted to upgrade the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to the nearly production ready FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

In spite of the long hours of work required to completely setup a new FreeBSD installation, everything went smooth. FreeBSD plays nice with the new controller card and everything is now up and running and back to normal. The old 120 GB drive was getting a little cramped anyway, the extra breathing room is going to be nice!

Traditionally I avoided this problem via a PS/2 KVM switch between my server and desktop PC. That solution met it’s end when I ousted my last desktop PC. In order to continue with the KVM style setup I would need to find a KVM equipped with USB keyboard and mouse ports and both VGA and DVI display ports, which apparently is not easy to come by short of some very high end setups.

It seems more often then not, the old fashioned strategies yield the greatest success. I opted for a NULL Modem cable (1969 called, they want their RS-232 back) and a Keyspan USA-19HS USB to Serial adapter for the Mac Mini.

I specifically opted for the Keyspan product as it is one of the few USB serial adapters with adequate drivers. Every other generic USB serial adapter I’ve stumbled apon has defined adequate as “Windows only” where as the Keyspan has drivers for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.

Enabling serial console on FreeBSD

Like every other task involving Unix derivatives in general and FreeBSD in specific, the setup is dead simple if you know how to do it:

1. Find the entry for ttyd0 in /etc/ttys and change it to approximate:

   ttyd0   "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"   vt100   on secure

2. Add console=”comconsole” to /boot/loader.conf:

   echo console=\"comconsole\" >> /boot/loader.conf

3. Send init(8) the HUP signal for the changes to be applied:

   kill -HUP 1

Connecting from the Client Machine

Connecting to the FreeBSD server from my Mac Mini (lilpapa) is as simple as using GNU Screen from the Terminal application. In my case:

screen /dev/tty.KeySerial1

Testing my New Setup

Using this new setup I have successfully upgraded Inferno (this server) from FreeBSD 6.1 to FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p5. What better way to test this setup then running make installworld in single user mode via the serial console?

Ken was impressively quick to respond and forward my request to Jonathon Fowler whom previously handled porting PNGOUT to other platforms.

Well lo and behold, as of today PNGOUT binaries for FreeBSD are available!