Interesting PfSense platform
- Thread starter nickscott18
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Interesting indeed. Also interesting that is supports either 1.5v or 1.35v SO-DIMMs. Most other J1900 boards require low-voltage memory. Its also laid out for thin-miniITX so chassis options would be possible with even less volume than the Chinese J1800/1900 that started this thread.
Have you considered a Bannana pi for PFsense box? DC 1ghz arm and 1gb ram.
www.bananapi.com
I kind of want to build one now.
Banana PI BPI R1 - Shop Cheap Banana PI BPI R1 from China Banana PI BPI R1 Suppliers at SinoVoip Co.,Limited Banana PI on Aliexpress.com
www.bananapi.com
I kind of want to build one now.
Banana PI BPI R1 - Shop Cheap Banana PI BPI R1 from China Banana PI BPI R1 Suppliers at SinoVoip Co.,Limited Banana PI on Aliexpress.com
Sadly there's no spec about how high that board is with the cooler.
Cramming 4 into 1U chassis sounds tempting.
The J1900D2Y appears to be compliant with Thin Mini ITX. Nothing in the specs or manual confirm that but a Google of "D1900D2Y" returns many hits for Chinese sites referencing Thin Mini ITX. Sadly my Chinese is not good enough to make reading those sites worthwhile...
Assuming it is compliant with Thin Mini ITX, that spec calls for no more than 20mm from PCB bottom to any component top and an IO Shield height of 25mm. Don't know if that is thin enough for your 4x in 1U idea.
I looked down the line of PfSense on ARM a while back (may 2 years back - so things have probably changed since then), but at that point decided it would be easier to skip PfSense (didn't support ARM then, and doesn't appear to currently either), and build a firewall from scratch. None the less, that Bannana Pi board is quite interesting - I wonder how it's connected internally . . .
Most likely going to order one after the weekend - but looking at the images fairly closely - it might not be doable. Ethernet jacks (from the couple I looked at the specs of) are about 13.5mm high. Heatsink (well - rapid cooling plate . . .) appears to be maybe 3mm high above that. PCB is ~1.5mm thick. There are components sticking out the bottom, and am not going to guess the height of them - but assuming you have just over 20mm - the components would need to stick out the bottom by about than 2mm - and that might be pushing it.
But - that's assuming a layout similar to a C6100 (ie, 2 across, 2 high). If you went 2 across, 2 deep, and extended the connections for the board buried in the middle of the case - that should be workable - possibly need to draw a diagram to explain that a bit better though.
you can run esxi on celeron 847 (mine) -> GIGABYTE - Motherboard - CPU Onboard - GA-C847N-D (rev. 1.0)
that motherboard has two crappy realtek NIC( one for connect to the modem,and the other for esxi remote management), I added 1 PCI intel NIC(from my junk bins) for LAN, 2X4gb RAM, and 64gb SSD with esxi 5.5.X
running one linux gateway/router(ipcop), two ubuntu server, and one minimal ubuntu server for remote ssh.