Having decided upon m0n0wall for
our firewall, I set it up in the building machine room with a
small form factor Dell and an
Intel
Pro/1000 MT Dual Port NIC. Even before getting grief from the
campus IT group about installing a non rack mount machine into the
network rack, I knew I would need to replace it with a real rackmount
server at some point.
I created a requirements list for the server.
1 or 2U rackmount case
Sliding rack rails would be nice but are not required
4 network connections minimum, preferably 6. No more than two can
be 10/100, the rest must be gigabit.
The gigabit connections should be connected to the motherboard via
pci-x or pci express.
Preference given to Intel NIC's, however Broadcom and 3com are
likely acceptable as well.
The server should be able to boot from cdrom or floppy.
The motherboard must have pata ide on it.
The hard drive should have the cheapest drive that can be
purchased, as it will be replaced a compact flash ide adapter. (like
http://www.pcengines.ch/cflash.htm)
The motherboard and processor should be considered servergrade.
The processor should be at least 2ghz.
512megs of memory is fine. This should be in the form of one
512meg stick of ram, unless the motherboard can make use of dual channel
memory, in which case two 256 meg sticks is acceptable.
The system should cost less than $1500
Knowing that Dell
couldn't really provide what I wanted, and wanting an excuse to look
into some of the whitebox builders out there, I shopped my requirements
list around. In general I recieved quotes in just a day or two. For
every quote, I needed to follow up with a list of questions clarifying
or verifying various items on my requirements list. The contentious
issue was almost always how the gigabit ports were connected to the
processor.
One of the responses surprised me. I had asked for the specific model
number of the motherboard used so I could look up the chipsets used and
verify the bus used to connect the onboard network controllers to the cpu.
Instead of those answers, the salesman apologized and said that his
company could not provide the machine I requested. While this was the
most extreme "wrong" answer I recieved, I wasn't particularly happy with
any of the quotes I recieved. Mostly I found that salespeople don't seem
to like answering questions that are "hard". While I still have a few
months to check more possible whitebox companies, currently it looks like
I will be putting together my own machine based on a SuperMicro
bare bones system.
