I needed a firewall and ended up with pfSense with an Intel D2500CC motherboard. A retired Shuttle K-45 was used for the case, which turned out to be Mini-ITX compatible and a good candidate for case modding.
With the motherboard and powersupply being passively cooled, a SSD harddrive and a quiet fan makes the machine completely noiseless.
I had to cut out holes for the DVD-ROM and for the LCD.
The LCD is a “20×4 SureElec LCD” (USB) and works with lcdproc using the SureElec driver in pfSense.
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dmesg | grep CP2102 uslcom0: <CP2102 USB to UART Bridge Controller> on usbus3 |
The original PSU was broken and replaced with an Antec md-135 powersupply. Removing the original PSU also freed up space for a WLAN antenna(or two). The Intel D2500 has two Gigabit network cards and i added a Dual Gigabit NIC into the PCI slot. The fan mesh was removed.
The LCD did not fit inside the front panel so i had to separate the PCBs and extend them with a flat cable.
…and pictures of the original K-45:
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