Alix 2C.3 OpenBSD 4.3
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.
- 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!
Available disks are: sd0. Which one is the root disk? (or done) [sd0]Do you want to use *all* of sd0 for OpenBSD? [no] yes
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.
I got one of those too, with the same box, but I added a Winstrom C9 802.11a/b/g card and 2 dual-mode antennas. It seems a little difficult to install those pigtails in that box, though. They are too big for the job, but I will try to install them anyway, after I finish the initial configuration of the 4G CompactFlash card I got for this job. I overspecified a little to get a full experiment out of this. I intend to use this kind of board for many things; not just routing. If you answer this comment, I will keep in touch with updates. Kind regards.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:27 amThats awesome Carlos, I am a big fan of these boards.. it would be great if I could build a radided nas out of one of them.
June 9th, 2008 at 3:44 amI must say I have a pII which is going down next week, my alix 2c3 should arrive soon and I am happy that the install will be so easy
August 21st, 2008 at 11:27 amthanks alot
You should consider mounting all CF filesystems readonly. CF cards (especially cheap ones) easily use up their write cycles. You can get some inspiration on hoe to do it in flashdist’s /etc/rc script. I currently use a modified flashdist based install, but it’s too bare bones and needs a lot of tweaking to do anything besides routing, PF, and IPSEC.
November 2nd, 2008 at 11:07 amI setup an Alix last week similarly, with the help of a more experienced openbsd user. One glitch we had was that the compact flash card changed it’s name between the two machines, so we had to manually edit /etc/fstab
On the Thinkpad, the CF was /dev/sd0 It changed to /dev/wd0 on the Alix. There was a similar issue with the networking, we renamed the hostname.whatever file to be hostname.vr1 (mistakenly, should have been .vr0).
I think I also had some minor glitches that were fixed by updating the BIOS to the latest. Kind of a blast from the past using a serial console cable and Xmodem transfer!
December 18th, 2008 at 3:09 pm