Fanless server setup with FreeBSD, NetBSD on pinebooks, another BSDCan trip report, transparent network audio, MirBSD's Korn Shell on Plan9, static site generators on OpenBSD, and more.
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Silent Fanless FreeBSD Desktop/Server

Today I will write about silent fanless FreeBSD desktop or server computer … or NAS … or you name it, it can have multiple purposes. It also very low power solution, which also means that it will not overheat. Silent means no fans at all, even for the PSU. The format of the system should also be brought to minimum, so Mini-ITX seems best solution here.


I have chosen Intel based solutions as they are very low power (6-10W), if you prefer AMD (as I often do) the closest solution in comparable price and power is Biostar A68N-2100 motherboard with AMD E1-2100 CPU and 9W power. Of course AMD has even more low power SoC solutions but finding the Mini-ITX motherboard with decent price is not an easy task. For comparison Intel has lots of such solutions below 6W whose can be nicely filtered on the ark.intel.com page. Pity that AMD does not provide such filtration for their products. I also chosen AES instructions as storage encryption (GELI on FreeBSD) today seems as obvious as HTTPS for the web pages.


Here is how the system look powered up and working


This motherboard uses Intel J3355 SoC which uses 10W and has AES instructions. It has two cores at your disposal but it also supports VT-x and EPT extensions so you can even run Bhyve on it.


Components


Now, an example system would look like that one below, here are the components with their prices.


$49 CPU/Motherboard ASRock J3355B-ITX Mini-ITX
$14 RAM Crucial 4 GB DDR3L 1.35V (low power)
$17 PSU 12V 160W Pico (internal)
$11 PSU 12V 96W FSP (external)
$5 USB 2.0 Drive 16 GB ADATA
$4 USB Wireless 802.11n
$100 TOTAL


The PSU 12V 160W Pico (internal) and PSU 12V 96W FSP can be purchased on aliexpress.com or ebay.com for example, at least I got them there. Here is the 12V 160W Pico (internal) PSU and its optional additional cables to power the optional HDDs. If course its one SATA power and one MOLEX power so additional MOLEX-SATA power adapter for about 1$ would be needed. Here is the 12V 96W FSP (external) PSU without the power cord.


This gives as total silent fanless system price of about $120. Its about ONE TENTH OF THE COST of the cheapest FreeNAS hardware solution available – the FreeNAS Mini (Diskless) costs $1156 also without disks.


You can put plain FreeBSD on top of it or Solaris/Illumos distribution OmniOSce which is server oriented. You can use prebuilt NAS solution based on FreeBSD like FreeNAS, NAS4Free, ZFSguru or even Solaris/Illumos based storage with napp-it appliance.


###An annotated look at a NetBSD Pinebook’s startup

Pinebook is an affordable 64-bit ARM notebook. Today we’re going to take a look at the kernel output at startup and talk about what hardware support is available on NetBSD.
Photo
Pinebook comes with 2GB RAM standard. A small amount of this is reserved by the kernel and framebuffer.
NetBSD uses flattened device-tree (FDT) to enumerate devices on all Allwinner based SoCs. On a running system, you can inspect the device tree using the ofctl(8) utility:
Pinebook’s Allwinner A64 processor is based on the ARM Cortex-A53. It is designed to run at frequencies up to 1.2GHz.
The A64 is a quad core design. NetBSD’s aarch64 pmap does not yet support SMP, so three cores are disabled for now.
The interrupt controller is a standard ARM GIC-400 design.
Clock drivers for managing PLLs, module clock dividers, clock gating, software resets, etc. Information about the clock tree is exported in the hw.clk sysctl namespace (root access required to read these values).

# sysctl hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2
hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.rate = 200000000
hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.parent = pllperiph02x
hw.clk.sun50ia64ccu0.mmc2.parent_domain = sun50ia64ccu0


Digital Ocean
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###BSDCan 2018 Trip Report: Mark John