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