Mini-ITX Server Box

Tux-Lab had components on hand for a completely fan-less bare-bones Mini-ITX system. A small board with a passively-cooled CPU, a small 12V DC to ATX DC power supply that didn't need a fan, and a solid state drive for storage. All it needed was a simple basic box to keep everything in - which made it an ideal learning project as a follow-on to FreeNAS box V1. (Well, it can be argued that this simple box should have come first... but that wasn't the order things ended up being.)

This time there was no design challenge with hard drive placement or power supply fan clearance. Just a simple box with two sets of holes so convection will pull cold air from the bottom and let hot air out the top. The back plate had opening for the standard ITX motherboard port plate, plus two holes: One for the 12V DC power input, and the other for a momentary-on power switch.

The result was an upgrade from its previous placement, which was the bare circuit board sitting on top of a cardboard box. Now it has some minimal protection against accidents like an errant dropped paperclip shorting things out.

This machine is now set up with the Xen hypervisor and ready to run the server-side code of whatever future projects arise at Tux-Lab, as long as that code can run in a Xen virtual machine.