A new life for a "Google Mini" search appliace, PFsense, hardware hacking.

With our new "High Speed Cable Internet", it was time to replace my aging Linksys WRT54G v3 router running Tomato. It was on its last legs for some time, even our 3mg DSL would some times cause it to lock with more then 10 devices connected. Our new service came with this nasty new feature, called a montly bandwidth CAP. Thanks Wave! These CAP's essentially monitor your monthly usage and charge you for exceeding the provided amount. This is fine for most people, but despite choosing the plan with the largest provided bandwidth allotment (300gb), and since I just bought 14tb of hard drive space to upgrade my file server and my brother is also a rather heavy user, I had to do something to monitor our bandwidth consumption.
 
I decided to go with something I have worked with in the past. This is not the first time I have ran pfSense at my house, but after a hardware failure last year it was replaced due to a lack of time. Now that I am "back in the IT game" I seem to enjoy playing around with this stuff more then last year when I was running my car shop. Now don't get me wrong, there are dozens of other great pieces of software out there, but pfSense really has a solid foundation and does everything I need it to do right now. If you are interested in other Open Source or free routers, may I suggest Untangle, ClearOS, and moNoWall, ipCop, or Smoothwall.

pfSense offers QOS, bandwidth monitoring and reporting, and runs on a very tiny platform designed for embbeded or low power boxes. It is one of my favorite firewalls due to its simplicity and full feature set.

As a frequent craigslister, I find myself seeing the same items listed over and over. Most the time these are overpriced or junk, but every once in a while I find something neat that no one else wants. Honestly, if I did not have a background in hardware hacking, I would not have bought this either. Then again, anything that is bright blue and slapped with big shiny letters that say GOOGLE is just too hard to resist, especially for $20.  Hey, plus now when people ask, I can say my house is powered by the Google! (Bad Geek joke 1...)

This beautiful piece of hardware is a 1u Google Mini search appliance. Its original use? Providing a internal search engine based off Google's search engine, allowing indexing and fast access to intranets, sharepoint sites, and public documents in Small Medium Businesses. Manufactured by Gigabyte for Google, this 1u featured a Dual Pentium III motherboard, PC133 sdram, 3 hot swap IDE hard drives attached to a Promise technologies backplane and raid controller, dual nics, tons of little 40mm screamer fans (found in nearly every full length 1u) and some rather neat built in options. All together, it was a screamer, in 2003. When I picked it up off Craigslist, it had been stripped of processors, ram, heatsinks, and hard drives.

This left it rather useless, plus who runs a dual pIII server anymore? Not only would tracking the parts down be a PITA, I already had the hardware I wanted to run. A nice, power efficient Dual Core Atom 1.66ghz, left over from a server upgrade. My only problem? This case is too damn big. Well, it is not really a problem with the right tools :). After stripping the chassis and taking the old guts to my local e-cycler, I laid out a basic design and headed to the shop. Thankfully the Google lettering was actually on a large piece of vinyl and was easily removed for a later use.

Remember kids, always wear your safety gear when playing with powertools.

Well that solved 1/2 my problem. I just needed to take care of the mounting points left over by the larger uATX motherboard and hot swap bays. I choose the front half of the case for 2 reasons. 1) The rear was stamped with the old motherboards backplate and 2) I could keep the retention points for the front cover.With the cutting, grinding, sanding, and cleanup out of the way, I found the stand offs I wanted to keep and removed the rest.

Hardware:
Intel Atom D510
2GB DDR2 800
Intel Pro1000/MT
1gb Compact Flash card
CF to IDE adapter
250w 1u powersupply

Now I ended up keeping the 1u's factory powersupply. Not only did it mount up and the cables all reach, but I was also able to modify the fans to quiet it down significantly. The original chassis included a bank of 1u fans to keep the processors cool and air moving through the case. For some reason 2 of the 6 were Sunon 7cfm 40mm fans that happen to fit right in to the 1u powersupply, replacing its Delta screamers. The motherboard is mounted to two permanent stand offs and 2 spacers, preventing shortage. I did happen to have a 4 port NIC block + com port extender, along with a USB port block from a old hacked up case. These 3 along with the power connection make up the rear of the case. 

 I even found a blue powercord :).

Tucked temporarily away in the closet with our new cable modem. (Ignore the DSL modem, I have not removed it yet :).

Next up- Setup and
Impressions of pfSense 2.0 RC1 and using an embedded install with VGA :).

Marc

Jumping in to the 21st century with "Cable Internet".

Back in the early 2000's, our family was one of the first to get "High Speed DSL at a blazing 3Mbps" through our local telcom. I realize this must not be a big deal to most, but we live in the middle of no where. This replaced the 56k tied to a single Pentium III Dell, which did not suit our favorite games like Half Life, Team Fortress, and Unreal Tournament. Especially when both me and my brother wanted to play. Thankfully we soon both had computers and boy was sharing a DSL connection 10x faster then bridging a 56k connection. Soon after we added "IPTV" and for once could watch more then the 20 or so channels our antenna in the attic picked up.

Fast forward to 2011, my family has now moved back to my childhood home along with my brother. The aging DSL just did not cut it anymore and worse yet was the price. Who in their right mind would pay $45/m for 2.6Mbps DSL in 2011? The local telcom only offered 3mg DSL this far out and to be fair it did offer fiber, boasting up to a 60/60 line... but it ended 2 blocks up the street from us... Leaving us with no options, that was until Wave Broadband came through in 2009, purchasing the local cable provider. For a few years we dealt with the terrible speeds and choppy IPTV, but we finally gave in and decided to try it out.

Wave offered a number of plans, but seeing as both me and my brother are "heavy" users and my wife likes to stream movies/tv shows, we went for the fastest line offered this far out. The 18Mbps down/2Mbps service includes a 300gb/month cap, verses the 100gb/month on slower plans. This is not the fastest Wave offers, but it is the fastest they could guarantee a constant speed with. At $50 a month, we ditched the IPTV and have decided to go without cable TV. None of us have time for TV and when we do want to watch something, streaming services like Hulu and Netflix have replaced any need for cable in my mind. I am planning on hooking back up our digital antenna for OTA broadcasts, just in case there is a kids show on OPB my son wants to watch.

An appointment was made and figuring the standard "12-5" window, I took the afternoon off. I decided to maximize my time and have a friend over who needed some car assistance. He showed up right around 12:30 and we got to work on his project. Not 5 minutes later our installer showed up, ready to get everything done... I had not even cleared the brush from the cable boxes (not used in 20 years since the last owners.) The installer was nice, very patient, and was happy to work around our needs. Since cable had not been used in our 1891 house in 20 years, during any project we would rip out all the old RG59. This did not matter, as RG6 was needed.

Now here came the fun part... The main house sits on 8x8 timbers, with less then 8" of crawl space under them in some spots. The networking all lives in the study at the front of the house, opposite of the crawl space entrance. Our installer was not a small guy, and honestly neither am I. We both held a fairly similar 6ft 200pound build. We chatted a bit about what to do and at this point I offered to go under the house WITH him to assist... He somehow took this as I was going under... Honestly, it was not a problem for me. I had been under a few times, knew the obstacles, but never gone quite this far back.

I suited up, grabbed a flash light and shovel and one hour later I emerged, covered head to toe in dirt and dust. This was the most miserable thing I have done in a LONG time. I ended up digging under each of the 3 main beams to create 12" of clearance to squeeze under, and I mean squeeze. There was one point where I took a deep breath half way under and was stuck. I had to exhale all my air just to get through. At no point did I feel trapped though and we did end up getting the cable ran, but next time the installer gets to enjoy the misery of our crawlspace.

With everything hooked up, we ran our first speed test.

Not bad. Not bad at all. It turns out we are at the amplifier for the line and have an amazing signal. Mind you this changes drastically depending on time of day and where the test server is, but I have not dropped below 2.3MBps on an actual download speed. This is 10x better then our 300Kbps download the DSL gave us.


Would I recommend Wave broadband? It is too early to tell. Overall the service is as advertised and the installer was nice, on time, and even shared a few useful bits about the way Wave filters Cable TV. :)

Next up is our router solution and more about the pesky 300gb/month cap and how I plan to to keep track of it.

Marc