Tiny Boxen

swg101 writes "These people (openbrick.org) have developed a small computer designed for open source and free software. I quote: "This great little Linux box can be used as a firewall, micro-server, PABX, thin client, multimedia, almost anything imaginable. It contains a fanless 300 Mhz x86 compatible Geode processor and 128 MB SDRAM. Software can be installed on a Compact Flash or on an optional Hard Disk." Sounds like a nice solution for many applications."

Comments

Openbrick Off The Wall

[spacefight]

Looks like they're serving their website out of one of these tiny boxes ;)

Truely Quiet and Cheap

[fm6]

Hmm. If Flash memory gets just a little cheaper, you could have a serious desktop computer with no moving parts at all. Or you could install a disk drive that emphasizes low power consumption and limiting noise, rather than performance. There are a lot of desktop users who hate computer noice and dislike power waste.

Of course this all depends on availability of good Linux apps. It isn't just the Linux emphasis of the boxes designers. Windows is just too bloated to run on this kind of system.

Slashdotted...

[Cubeman]

I bet they need a fan on that CPU right about now :)

*flames scorch the motherboard*

Smoking

[Ratbert42]

Sounds like a nice solution for many applications."

Apparently not for webhosting.

Google Cache

[OrangeHairMan]

Get the Google cache here: http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:fi5nQ4GvkE0C: openbrick.org/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Orange

Ok, enough with the Google Cache's !!!

[CySurflex]

In a related story, due to Google's secret page-rank algorithm and over 200 messages in this thread linking to "Google Cache", a search for the words "Google Cache" brings up open brick.

Dual NIC

[mmca]

For firewall use, I would like to see dual NICs.
They would make great IDS nodes.
$300 bucks is a pretty good deal for a computer that small with that amount of proc power.

-M

Re:Dual NIC

[hazard]

Take a look here: Nagasaki Thin Client, there are versions with three NICs. OpenBrick actually looks to be a rebranded MS2100.

Re:Dual NIC

[friscolr]

in case you haven't seen these before- www.soekris.com/
486/133, 3 NICs, 4.85" x 5.7" mobos, 64 mb RAM, plus dedicated encryption boards for $332

There's also http://www.bcmcom.com/tech/BOX-3410/BOX-3410.htm
Geode 300mhz, 2 NICs in 106mm (W) x 178mm (L) x 65mm (H)

and http://www.nexcom.com/product/ebc/ebs1563p/
VIA C3 processor, 3 NICs, 177 (W) x 51 (H) x 228.6 (D) mm

Depending on what you need, you could buy an old laptop off of ebay and get 2 nics for it.

Clusters

[bwt]

It would be *very* cool if these things could be clustered together to make a scalable server. Need a database server? Then get 32 of these, each with a HD for ~$10K and cluster them together. Each comes with one HD, so you've got your RAID array. Need more power next year? Add 8 more.

With the coming onslaught of DRM on faster processors, the obvious solution is to find better ways to scale existing hardware products.

Re:Clusters

[bwt]

Uhhh... no.

The solution is to not use hardware that has integrated DRM.

I'm not sure why you are disagreeing. This doesn't have DRM, nor is it likely to ever have it if the existing design doesn't need to change to accomodate increasing performance demands.

To expand my idea: most hardware has become a commodity. There really is very little reason to fund "innovation" in it when that innovation is directed towards how to prevent us from doing certain things. I'd rather have the innovation directed towards providing me *cheaper* scalable interchangable parts that implement the existing hardware feature sets. Freeze the hardware and just buy more of it if you need more performance.

Buy a Mac or buy a workstation if you don't want DRM. You can get a 64 bit DEC Alpha really cheap now.
Yuck. Where's the fun in that? If you want those platforms, have at it. You haven't given me a single reason not to think that clustering small commodity items is not a good way, nor an interesting way, to solve computing problems.

Re:Clusters

[Sentry21]

You present an interesting but insubstantial point.

The rest of the world hates the idea of DRM - by and large, it's an American idea, and as much as you'd like to think otherwise, American media isn't worth sacrificing freedom for - the few good things that escape do so because they slip under the radar. I could easily (and largely have, already) abandoned American media. I suspect the rest of the world could do so as well. Perhaps the US would see its position as an informational power change.

Just a thought.

--Dan

AMAZING!!!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Add a 17 inch screen and you've got a new iMac!

Article with more details

[gregfortune]

openbrick.org seems to be getting hit pretty hard, but Linux Max has a pretty detailed article on the Open Brick.. And it's not slashdotted.. yet... http://www.linuxmax.net/news/00816.html

Unfortunately

[__aahlyu4518]

If you look at this page, you'll see that for some of the features you need a non-free XFree 3.3.6 driver. Another fun detail on that page : description says : 300 to 400 EUR while it is sold for 590 EUR. But it definately is cool. Once they sell it for less than that 590 (which would buy you a nice PC WITH storage), and that non-free Xfree 3.3.6 driver thing is solved... it is a really nice box.

And you call yourself a geek?

[Anonymous Coward]

This "boxen" issue has come up before on ./ and I'm surprised the argument continues.
1) Since the oh-so-consistent English language uses the term "oxen" as the plural of "ox", it sounds reasonable (and amusing) to use "boxen" for "box".
2) Any hacker or geek with some sense of computing history knows that clusters of the late, great VAX systems from Digital Equipment Corp. (pre-Compaq) were known as VAXen.
3) The English language has no ultimate authority comparable to the Royal Academy of the Language in Spain, or its equivalent in France. So making up words in English is quite easy, and legitimacy comes to them with wide usage. No need for the latest official dictionary to be published. ;-)

Soekris

[ksw2]

I've been eye-balling a similar system over at Soekris. Same idea, but with 2 or 3 NICs integrated.

Too much money!!

[nweaver]

300 to 400 euros is WAY too much money for what you get, when you compare with things like the Via Epia motherboard (available for $130 at outpost. The Via Epia has an 800 Mhz x86 processor, SDRAM slots, is 18 cm on a side, and has practically everything you need but memory, storage and an ATX power supply. They even have a completely fanless 500 MHz version (althouh you can't get that version from Fry's).

Filesystems...

[Vengie]

One thing about all the compact flash stuff. Typical flashable memory can only be "erased" on the order of 100,000 times. Now, many of you are saying "sure, this isn't a problem" -- but i dont think most /.'ers realize how many temp files Linux (and Operating Systems in general) create. Unfortunately, using Fat32 or NTFS(if you were "Gasp" running nt/2k), you would be repeatledy using the same flash sectors, quickly burning them out.

This means the only really useful filesystem is LFS (see the SPRITE project -- http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/projects/sprite/sprite. html ) and even at that, you need to be able to have some mechanism to rotate your two checkpoints or else THEY get burnt out.
So no, you can't have a box that has no hard drive, as of yet, unless you have very specialized uses for which lfs work well. (sequential writes/reads, etc)
Wee! Final exam questions with applications in the real world!

Re:Filesystems...

[Roadmaster]

"but i dont think most /.'ers realize how many temp files Linux (and Operating Systems in general) create. "

So, just mount /tmp/ on a ram drive...

Actually, there are many projects, a lot of them aimed at diskless workstations, that do just that, and even symlink all other commonly changing files so that they actually reside on /tmp.

Re:Filesystems...

[nathanh]

And /var, and then make /etc/mtab a symlink into one of the writable mounts, and configure syslogd to stop writing to /dev/log, and make xfs stop writing to /usr/lib/X11/fonts, and then make sure the home directories are writeable if you don't want a whole lot of applications to scream and fail, etc.

/dev/log is a socket, not a file. /etc/mtab is already a symlink in some distributions.

And while some warts remain it's a darn sight better these days than it used to be. You can reasonably expect that only /var, /tmp and /home need to be writable filesystems. And if you find an exception then most people will agree that's buggy and needs to be fixed. A few years ago it took a Herculean effort to convince some people that writable /usr was not a good thing!

Link to specs and pics.

[10 Speed]

specs and pics

Future Conversation...

[Cyno01]

Boss: Why is the server down? Sysadmin Guy: Well sir, I think I lost it. Boss: Lost it?? Sysadmin Guy: Well, i had it in my pocket, it must've fallen out when...

Any better than Shuttle?

[LinuxInDallas]

What would make this any better than the cool looking mini computers from shuttle? This thing is $489 and I just saw that Fry's has the Shuttle P4 computer for about $300. The OpenBrick machine has a PCMCIA and CF slot but unless you are a laptop user you most likely aren't wanting PCMCIA anyway and CF card readers that plug into USB are fairly cheap.

Other options

[-tji]

There are several other small boards that would make excellent Linux network servers. But, most of the ones I have seen are not sold in small quantities.

Such as this board: Nexcom EBC563

It uses the low power / low heat VIA C3. The C3 is MUCH faster than the Geode used in the "OpenBrick". It has 3 NIC's, making it a great firewall.

Now, only if I could buy it, in a small case..

Bah! This is what you need for a diskless firewall

[^MB^]

Lex LIGHT barebones system
Lex Systems
Its tiny, powerfull, and has tripple ethernet... what more could you ask for?

well maybe a fanless cpu.
-Nick

now if i can only find somewhere that sells it....

Umm, yes there is

[jerm_nz]

http://www.dictionary.com/search?q=boxen

Third entry down

200K writes is still too few

[yerricde]

The special logic involves checking to see if the flash bit contains the value (1/0) you want before writing to it.

Not exactly. Flash memory is written to by first erasing the sector to all 1's and then clearing the bits you want cleared.

With a 50% hit-rate 100k writes becomes 200k.

200,000 writes is still too few for a directory track.

data of a particular type (eg html or mpeg) tend to bias towards 1s or 0s.

HTML might bias slightly, but MPEG doesn't. If it did, you would be able to compress MPEG files further with the Huffman coding used in gzip. (You can't.)

Re:Start here

[anticypher]

Found a link from a link of a small shop in Lille selling chassis for these bricks. Maybe one of these would be a good place to start building a beowulf cluster.

However, on their webpage they state:
OpenChassis are sold to computer experts only.
So don't mention you saw it on /., or they'll kick you out of the shop :-)

the AC

Re:Dude..

[amorsen]

Fortunately, here in the USA, the First Amendment protects our right to write and publish generalized streams of characters, not just text streams that are comprised solely of whitespace-separated lists valid English words.

As long as those streams of characters are not compilable into computer programs which can be used to circumvent access control.

Source(s) of the OpenBrick

[anticypher]

That web site looks much better than the one I found with a little googling.

The original design seems to come from Lucky Star in taiwan, but they went out of business earlier this year. Their PDFs show a lot more details of the boards and connectors.

Nagasaki looks like they have picked up the product line and are continuing with it. It would sure be nice to get a few of these for cheaper than the 470 Euros the OpenBrick guys are reselling them for. I can't google up any other distis here in Europe this late at night. Maybe I'll try again during the working week.

I've learned the chinese/taiwanese shops in the big cities are quite willing to get in exotic parts like these boxen. Every one of them seems to have an uncle or a brother as a contact in taiwan who knows someone, etc. It just takes a little social engineering to get them to dig for you, on the hope you'll buy lots of those components.

I've got a project coming up to make small, cheap, customisable firewalls supporting DSL or cable clients, no fans or noise or hard disks. Has to be half the price of a cisco pix 501, which are on ebay for around 500 euros. This MS2100/OpenBrick box would almost do it, except I don't want to be powering a sound card, parallel port, NTSC video, or all that other useless cruft.

the AC

Overwriting will AND the data

[yerricde]

Clearing to 1s then blanking 0s would be more writes than just basic overwriting.

Flash memory is divided into sectors. When you erase a sector of flash memory, the whole sector becomes all 1's. The 100K writes figure refers to 100K successful erases of a given sector. "Just basic overwriting" would AND the written data into the existing data. I'm guessing that flash file systems take advantage of this somehow.

And Huffman encoding is about repeating patterns, not frequency of 1s and 0s without order taken into account. You take a long but frequent pattern and replace it with a shorter one, but then have to remap the shorter one etc.

Huffman maps fixed-length sequences of bits (usually 4, 8, or 16 at a time) to variable-length sequences of bits. If you have lots more 1's than 0's, then you'll get a lot of 1111, 1110, 1101, 1011, and 0111 nibbles, which can be reduced to shorter words. However, JPEG, MP3, and MPEG already have compression (including Huffman coding) in the bitstream, so re-compressing the data isn't going to help.