[wellylug] mini ITX systems

[Wood Brent]

--- Jamie Dobbs <jamie.dobbs at paradise.net.nz> wrote:
> I'm thinking of one of these to act as my
> mail(fetchmail/courier-imap/courier=op3d)/web/FTP server. 
> 
>

The FIC Falcon, as mentioned by Lindsay, is based on the VIA ITX platform. It
was one of the two SFF systems I brought along to a WLUG meeting a few months
ago. I have customers running a variety of OS's, from W98/XP to Gentoo, RH &
Mandrake linuxes. The Linux ones are typically servers such as you suggest, or
firewalls, with a low profile PCI LAN card in addition to the on-board (Rhine
chipset/driver).

There is an importer for the bare ITX boards somewhere, but they wanted more
for the board than I could get the Falcon, (with P/S & case) for.

I have had a discussion about running one as a W98 box for his kids, booting
off a Linux server, which seemed quite feasible (given LAN boot device support
in BIOS) but the loss of his job kicked that one, so I haven't tried. It raises
intersting possibilities about diskless firewalls, etc...

A lowish profile TNT2 graphics card had some minor surgery on it to cut the
back plane  to fit the Falcon low profile PCI slot, which gave much improved
games performance for one Windows user. If anyone knows of a low profile PCI
graphics card I'd like to know about it, to obviate the need for such surgery
in future. I've only been able to track down low profile AGP cards so far.



Cheers

  Brent Wood