While moving all the eMail from one server to the other (my old server will be shut down by January 22nd – but this site is already on the new one), I received a package via UPS. Inside: 2x PCI-X Dual Port Intel cards. Yeah – PCI-X. I don’t have any PCI-X ports in one of my systems, but I was told it will work fine in a standard 3.3V PCI port 
So I opened up the gateway box and installed it. To be honest, I never thought it would fit – I had bought the cards for the fileserver (one + 1 spare), but was too curious if it would work in the small gateway. As you can see on the following photos, it fits – and Debian lists the card as 2x Intel 82546EB ethernet ports (lspic & ifconfig assigned it to eth1 & eth2 (eth0 is the onboard NIC).
I got a second Fujitsu-Siemens Futro! Yeah! For just 20€ This one received the new 4GB CF card I bought last week and it will run Debian, too. This box will be awesome! While the first one will run as gateway in the house, this cutie will be put into the shelter.
“Why?” I see you asking. From the family, I’ve got a bit Xmas money and instead of buy expensive stuff (like lovely Animé figures (oh it’s hard to resist – believe me)), I decided to get what I’ve written on every single wish list for the last (at least) 5 years. A weather station! But not a display that you put and your desk and you’re done. No! This one will have own instruments. I’ve chosen the WH 1080, because it has great Linux support. I will use it the same way I use the internal sensors (shown in a blog post some weeks ago), a little perl script will grab the data from the sensors and print it into file(s). rrdtool and a cronjob will create graphs from this source. I can’t await to get my hands on this
However – here are 2 more photos from the “dream team”.
Thorsten
I like that: fanless, compact, 2+ lan ports…what does that cost including the intel card?
Dennis Klein
I had paid 8,90€ for the card + 20€ for the thin client + 25€ for the CF card – so: 53,90€ for the complete box.
NoLife
How much RAM do those thin clients have?
Dennis Klein
The Gateway (Mumble) has 256MB and the other thin client is equipped with 512MB RAM. Not much, but fine for the small jobs they will do
pali7x
what’s the spec of those cpu? i’m a bit surprised to see they come with built-in CF slot.
Dennis Klein
ThinClients pretty often have CF Cards. My Netvista from IBM also has a CF Card slot – but is meanwhile a bit too slow. Fine machine for the old IPCop and a not too fast DSL.
However: The CPU is not Intel based, it’s a Transmeta 800MHz, which emulates an Intel CPU and is quiet fast doing that.
pali7x
transmeta did produce x86 based processor, so its compatible with any x86 os/apps. i believe your thinclient run at native x86 instead of emulation
i never had any experience with thinclient yet, so this is a good read and perhaps to become my next NAS. i build mostly from old p4 boxes, which isn’t really power efficient.
AntElitist
Neat I must say. Good deal hah
pali7x
ops, i’m wrong about native x86 execution, it did emulate x86 instruction (and possibly other instruction at the same time) which is, for me, cool!
i’m going to dig some stuff about transmeta processor.
keine HDD’s – CF Card – 265 MB RAM – neue Namen | Magnus Hinzke
[...] Somit baue ich Dennis Klein nicht nur seinen ESXi Server nach, sondern auch noch seinen ThinClient. [...]
jaybe
Do you use the CF card for the whole filesystem in read/write mode? Don’t you expect problems with reduced amount of write cycles on CF cards?
I want to build a firewall with an Futro S300, booting from a CF card but with / mounted read only and putting /var on a RAM based filesystem or parts of /var with many write acceses (e.g. /var/log or /var/lib).
Dennis Klein
I did, but after some weeks I saw the system crashing sometimes. I guess the CF card is damaged meanwhile. I followed some tutorials to use ext2 instead of ext3, noatime in the /etc/fstab, tmp & var in the RAM etc, but I ended up getting filesystem errors. I just bought 2x 2GB IDE SSDs to put into the IDE port. I need to solder it at the weekend to grab some power for the SSD from the Futro S300, but this should solve all issues