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I am considering building a Mini-ITX for a server. Has anyone built one? If so, what do I really need to look out for? What problems did you experience?

Screenies:



More info:
http://206.14.132.88/products/Travla/c134/C134.html

Straker wrote:I am considering building a Mini-ITX for a server. Has anyone built one? If so, what do I really need to look out for? What problems did you experience?

Screenies:



More info:
http://206.14.132.88/products/Travla/c134/C134.html

I noticed those fellas over at damnsmalllinux.org are selling these as well. Let me know how you fair with such if you would.

Thanks.

I bought one about 4 years ago from these guys: http://www.logicsupply.com/

It ran fine but would not work well with power hungry PCI cards. I use it every once in a while for a firewall if my hardware based firewall goes bad (which happens quite a bit for some reason).

I have been thinking about buying one of the new ones that can take 12volts DC directly and make a MP3 player for my motorcycle. It would be cool to have it all setup with some sort of controller attached to the handle bars that would navigate the music. Also, I have thought about getting a Bluetooth helmet to use with this system. Now that would be cool.

I've had experience with these VIA boards. For a server, there is a good choice of board - PD10000 - which has 2 LAN ports, which can be useful. There is also a DP (dual processor) board - VT-310DP, which has 3 LAN ports (one has Gigabit ethernet). Some of these attractive boards are getting hard to find since VIA is phasing them out to streamline their offering. At one stage they had more than a dozen boards that were so similar, it was hard to determine which was the best choice. Bare in mind, most of these boards only have 1 memory slot but usually have 2 IDE ports, and the SP13000 has SATA. The boards are great for quiet PCs since they draw little power, and it is quite possible to build 12V PCs for your car or boat. It is easy to underpower the system, since people forget about HDs etc that draw alot of power, so make sure you do the power calculations to ensure that the (usually puny) power supply that comes with these mini-ITX cases is going to be sufficient, else you'll be chasing weird issues.

This page may be useful to calc power needs.

A friend of mine also plans to build a mini-ITX based PC.

Thanks for all the feedback. I am not planning on any PCI cards so I think the biggest power draw will be the hard drive. But there are a lot of PS choices out there for these things now.

Thanks for the power calc page - very helpful.

If I end up doing it, then I will let you guys know how it worked out.

Beach wrote:I have been thinking about buying one of the new ones that can take 12volts DC directly and make a MP3 player for my motorcycle. It would be cool to have it all setup with some sort of controller attached to the handle bars that would navigate the music. Also, I have thought about getting a Bluetooth helmet to use with this system. Now that would be cool.

You could probably turn that into a business.

@Beach - I also want to put Xubuntu on this - but only if hamachi works (hence my other post), I will post my results in the hamachi forum once I do more command line testing.

Straker wrote:

Beach wrote:I have been thinking about buying one of the new ones that can take 12volts DC directly and make a MP3 player for my motorcycle. It would be cool to have it all setup with some sort of controller attached to the handle bars that would navigate the music. Also, I have thought about getting a Bluetooth helmet to use with this system. Now that would be cool.

You could probably turn that into a business.

It's a good idea. I am not sure about the space availability on a bike, but the VIA nano boards are even smaller ((12cm x 12cm, but still relatively expensive).

I did see the Nano boards... wow, I did not know they could get even smaller!

There are many considerations when building something like this since everything for a motorcycle needs to be somewhat waterproof. It will have Bluetooth A2DP stereo output at a minimum. I want to stay away from a LCD screen and focus on voice prompt navigation. If I get this going, I post it here since I plan to use Linux for the OS and PB for the interface.

That sounds great Beach. I'll have to 'favs' this thread.

Also, the calc offering, nice!

Mini-ITX is cool

Here is my latest little project: http://freak.purearea.net/stuff/cube.jpg
(no laughs about the case, i know i suck at building cases )

As some here know i am very much into silent PC stuff (as evident by my addiction to watercooling)
and with this one i took it to the extreme:

- passively cooled itx board
- small power supply without a fan (it does not need an external notebook powersupply as with most such projects)
- flash Disc-On-Module instead of a harddrive (http://www.dsl-ltd.co.uk/products/domspec.htm)
In total, there is not a single moving thing in the whole case (except the speaker)
... absolute silence

The basic concept is very similar to this project: http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/rundfunker/
except mine is primarily aimed at playing webradio through the wireless network.
(it does play mp3 as well of course)

It is running DamnSmallLinux with anything that is not needed disabled to cut down
on the bootup time. The menu and lcd display stuff is of course written in PB.
For the development i am running xubuntu from a separate HD.


As for cutting down power usage, using a notebook HD helps alot. Even better
are these flash modules, although they are still quite small, and have a limited
amount of write operations before they get damaged, so they are not the
best for every kind of use.
Of course if you use it for stuff like playing DVDs, you will have a lot of power usage
(for an itx system). and there is not much that can be done about it.

If you use an ITX case that comes with a power supply, be sure to check a bit
about the power supply thats in it. They are sometimes quite loud, and sometimes
provide much more power than needed, expecially for systems that are intended
for server tasks only. Power supplies of 75W or more are totally oversized for
such applications.
My system runs of a 25W supply, and that is more than enough for what it does.

Hey that's pretty righteous Freak!

For those interested in Linux for these boards, try epiOS which is a linux tailored for EPIA boards, and Puppy Linux also runs well.

> flash Disc-On-Module instead of a harddrive

I second that - using a compact flash to IDE adapter is another alternative.

Very nice freak!

I used an EPIA MK2 Epiaboard inside my car with a touch screen display. It was wunderfull!

After I bought a new car I used my epia system as a homeserver.
But after several days I noticed that I get downtimes and hangups due to temperatur problems.

Its not the best idea to run a MiniITX system as a 24/7 system. Some weeks ago I bought an office system (arround 200 € complete system with AMD processor and 512 MB ram) which runs much more stable. (And I'm on the way top up on uptimeproject.net )

The EPIA MK-II Mainboard has not enough power to run as a Home-Theatre System or MCE. I tried much but its not possible to record a movie and do some other things on the system. (Even if your TV card own's an MPEG-encoder chip)

Mike