It was time to replace my mid-tower Pentium II soho router running OpenBSD with something smaller. There has been quite a bit of interest in the community about single board computers, such as soekris and alix and I decided to dive right in. Single board computers are just that, everything you need for a basic bare bones machine. Due to cost I chose an ALIX 2C.3 board and a silver case to go with it.
Hardware:
| Item | Price |
| ALIX 2C.3 | $137.00 |
| 15v/1.2A AC-DC Power Adapter | $9.95 |
| Enclosure 3 LAN for Alix.2 | $12.95 |
| 1GB CF card | $10 |
| Targus TG-CRD25 Universal 32-in-1 Memory Card Reader | $4.99 |
| Total: | $174.89 |
Software:
I chose OpenBSD as the operating system because of it's simplicity, pf, and I use it everyday. There is a project by nmedia.net that focuses on building OpenBSD images for single board computers called flashdist but I decided to take a different approach.
Installation: Putting OpenBSD on Compact Flash
- Connect usb cf reader with memory card inserted to any i386 machine
- Insert OpenBSD CD and boot from it
- Upon boot my cf card is recognized as /dev/sd0
- Follow basic install guide which can be found here
- Once you get to the part where you select your disk supply the path to your cf.
Available disks are: sd0.
Which one is the root disk? (or done) [sd0] <enter>
Do you want to use *all* of sd0 for OpenBSD? [no] yes
- Since the disk is so small I decided just to go ahead and make a single partition which mounts "/"
- Configure your networking etc... and select what packages you need (with size concerns in mind)
- After the packages are installed go through the rest of the setup criteria and halt the fresh install
- Remove the CF card and insert it into your ALIX board and boot.
- Your ALIX board should be addressed and running sshd, login and config!
I added wget, pftop, and ntop through pkg_add, configured named for local dns, and configured dhcpd to provide addresses for all hosts on my network.
This device is awesome....tiny...silent...low power and does everything I need.