Posted by Kromey at 1:48pm Jun 2 '10We had a power outage on Monday. When the power came back on, my router did not. Seems like it may have been fried by a surge, despite being plugged into a surge protector that seems to have (fortuitously) protected everything else plugged into it, including my HDTV, XBox 360, and PS3.
A brief bit of background: My router was actually a 10ish-year-old HP Pavilion mini tower PC, running Linux and using a variety of tools to act as firewall, gateway (i.e. the thing that lets computers in my apartment get to the internet), DNS server, etc. It worked really well, despite having a paltry 64MB of RAM and 667MHz processor. When the power came back on, and every time I unplug and plug it back in, the CPU fan starts spinning happily, the HDD activity light comes on steady (although no actual HDD activity is happening), the power LED stays off, and the power button is completely non-responsive. Best guess is the motherboard is fried, but regardless the thing is not worth the time and effort to troubleshoot and repair.
My new goal is to replace it. I want a low-power system (this thing is on 24/7, so a 350-watt rig is out of the question), ideally low-noise or even silent (i.e. fanless). I've spotted things like the fit-PC, but I also need to have 2 (at least) Ethernet connections, and the fit-PC2i (which has that) costs upwards of $300.
I do happen to have a couple of old HP thin clients; toss in a USB thumbdrive and add a USB-Ethernet adapter, and that could work.
There's also a company called Polywell that sells mini-ITX systems, many of which are fanless and several of which offer multiple (up to 4!) Ethernet connections. So far, though, getting so much as a price for a system has proven difficult. I'll try sending another e-mail after I post this...
Anyway, anyone have any suggestions? RAM and CPU requirements are minimal (I was running beautifully in 64MB with a mere 667MHz), as are storage requirements (I could fit comfortably within 8GB); really I just need multiple Ethernet ports (at least 2), and it's got to be low-power and (ideally) fanless (simply "very quiet" is acceptable).
A brief bit of background: My router was actually a 10ish-year-old HP Pavilion mini tower PC, running Linux and using a variety of tools to act as firewall, gateway (i.e. the thing that lets computers in my apartment get to the internet), DNS server, etc. It worked really well, despite having a paltry 64MB of RAM and 667MHz processor. When the power came back on, and every time I unplug and plug it back in, the CPU fan starts spinning happily, the HDD activity light comes on steady (although no actual HDD activity is happening), the power LED stays off, and the power button is completely non-responsive. Best guess is the motherboard is fried, but regardless the thing is not worth the time and effort to troubleshoot and repair.
My new goal is to replace it. I want a low-power system (this thing is on 24/7, so a 350-watt rig is out of the question), ideally low-noise or even silent (i.e. fanless). I've spotted things like the fit-PC, but I also need to have 2 (at least) Ethernet connections, and the fit-PC2i (which has that) costs upwards of $300.
I do happen to have a couple of old HP thin clients; toss in a USB thumbdrive and add a USB-Ethernet adapter, and that could work.
There's also a company called Polywell that sells mini-ITX systems, many of which are fanless and several of which offer multiple (up to 4!) Ethernet connections. So far, though, getting so much as a price for a system has proven difficult. I'll try sending another e-mail after I post this...
Anyway, anyone have any suggestions? RAM and CPU requirements are minimal (I was running beautifully in 64MB with a mere 667MHz), as are storage requirements (I could fit comfortably within 8GB); really I just need multiple Ethernet ports (at least 2), and it's got to be low-power and (ideally) fanless (simply "very quiet" is acceptable).
My router died - Kromey