I was at a customer last week and they had two "servers" which I was quite take with. I guess they were nano-itx, about 12cm square and about 5cm tall. The case was very robust and mostly mesh. I think the cooling was entirely passive.

Most importantly, they appeared to have two gigabit Ethernet ports. Most of the tiny little PCs I've seen only have a single one. This is critical for the applications I have in mind. An Atom or Via processor would be fine, but I do need two ethernet ports.

I've had a little look around but I can't find anything entirely similar. Unfortunately the customer didn't know because they were sent from their head-office in a different time zone. Has anyone seen something fitting the description?

Thanks

If you have room and getting on for £90 you can get a PCI-e x1 adapter clicky

Or, is this what you're looking for [url=http://buy.advantech.eu/AIMB-210G2-S6A1E/AIMB-210G2-S6A1E/model-AIMB-210G2-S6A1E.htm]clicky[/url. No idea about the company though, you may want to check out but it's a mini itx atom with dual ethernet.

Edit: Just noticed that it's DDR2 though. They may be worth having a look through though. Here's a DDR3 model clicky

Asus & Intel also make itx boards with dual GB Ethernet.

if you don't need GB Ethernet & can make do with 10/100 then Epia make the CL10000 which has 2 ports on it & can be had for less than £50 on ebay

I can't get that advantech link to load right now, but if that's a motherboard only I'm really after a fully built unit because we'd be shipping dozens of them regularly and self-build is not an option. However, yes that motherboard does look suitable if rather larger than I was thinking of - maybe I was wrong; it's still pretty small and totally suitable. You've given me something to start with there, so thank you for that.

There's definitely no room for an expansion card in the case size I'm thinking of

Ideally, budget for the entire thing is around £180 without OS but including HDD etc because that's what our existing (much larger) product costs.

Again, yes actually that mobo would be fine too... but I need a "ready to ship" product.

I kinda wish I'd taken a picture of them, but it felt too much like industrial espionage

Let me take a photo of one of our units at work. We've got some tiny ones that are small enough to fit in to a car/van.

Any other requirements (we've got a supplier we use for these)?

Or if you want to watch your budget and 10/100 is fine then get a cheaper setup with just the one port and by a USB to ethernet adapter to pop in your USB.

They cost around £14 clicky

There are 10/100/1000 ones out there too.

It's an alternative I guess.

I have thought of that, but they're untidy and Linux support is often a problem.

It's frustrating because I've seen exactly what I want but I don't know where to buy it!

Ok, try this:

This clicky lists all the mini-itx boards it has with the number of LAN ports, such as this one clicky for £109 which has a Dual Core 1.5GHz Atom. This one already has 2x 10/100/1000 ports but also has the option of adding a daughter board with a further 3 LAN ports.

There are several to look at on there, the one I link two I think only has upto 2GB RAM but there are others with much more if that's what you need.

That would be cool, thanks. The ones I saw last week had no branding or any other clues on them!

Only requirements are:

Low cost.
Small and cool running
Fully assembled and ready to go
Dual nic
2GB or more ram
100GB or more disk space
USB for installing software

There's several different networking/telecoms applications, but they often call for separate WAN and LAN connections and it would be great to standardise on a single product. Any modern dual core processor would likely be fine, and graphics are totally irrelevant.

* sniff * took me ages to find that site * sniff *



This thread has got me thinking, maybe I need a home firewall.... Well, I don't need one, or do I?

Look like great little bits of kit. What you going to be using it for JJ?

How about these? (Clickies btw.)





That last one isn't as small as you want but it'd do the job.

Cool.

How many units do you expect to need? (only asking as the supplier will ask me and pricing will depend on volume, the least number of phone calls to China the better for me)

We'd only be ordering one or two at a time, maybe a dozen or so a year... so not exactly "volume" quantities.

Thanks!

Thanks, but either over-budget or under powered


Yeah some of those motherboards were very nice indeed (I already have that site book-marked btw :p). I know it doesn't take that long to stick them in a case, but unfortunately it's as much about selling the product to my boss as it is about time. He's much more likely to commit to a commercial product with a defined cost, although we have done a few extremely heavily customised bits of hardware as one-offs.

We're a voice & data company; "your one stop communications provider". We provide pretty much anything datacomms related. Specifically, these would be for running things like:

1. Avaya IP Office application server - serves multiple roles including voicemail and remote telephony users: http://support.avaya.com/css/P8/documents/100129363
2. Asterisk PBX - we do a "hosted voip" system which is ideal for companies with a lot of home workers, but where there are more than about 5 phones on one site it's more efficient to use a local SIP proxy.
3. Advanced firewall - usually we use a rather good German brand of router, but sometimes you need more flexibility. For example:
4. Reverse-proxy application gateway - providing secure remote access to intranet services.

Most sales are standard kit and customers often provide their own server hardware, but it's not unusual to need something slightly customised. These tend to be fairly small customers with tight budgets, and often absolutely nowhere to put the hardware. For example, we have one customer we provided with an Acer Aspire Revo which is now stuffed behind a fridge running their voicemail and call logging...