[asterisk-users] Fanless solution

[Gordon Henderson]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Tim Panton wrote:

> On 14 Feb 2007, at 16:37, shadowym wrote:
>
>> Hi there,
>> 
>> I'm looking for a compact fanless solution preferrably wall mountable and
>> not too exotic.  It needs to be commercial grade.  I don't really consider
>> most of the Via ITX solutions I have seen commercial grade but perhaps
>> someone can convince me otherwise.
>
> No, I don't think they are commercial grade. I have 2 dead Via ITX 
> motherboards
> out of 6 I've bought in the last couple of years.

And I have over a dozen newish Via CN1000 boards ticking away quietly in 
various applications (mostly asterisk), 2 EK1000 boards (with variable 
speed fans which never seem to come on) acting as routers, and 3 older (4 
years) 533MHz boards still in daily use as my asterisk R&D systems, all 
without issues so-far...

... which doesn't necessarily mean they are prefect, but they are working 
for me.

The issue with "commercial grade" for me, at least is making the box not 
look like a PC - there are mini ITX mobos with headers rather than 
on-board sockets, etc. but then there's the additional engineering required 
to put them in a custom box, and I'm not quite ready for that yet!

Wall mounting case:

   http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=77

but it's a bit ugly (but does anyone care with wall mounting cases? Anyone 
know of prettier ones I can get in the UK?)

There is a fanless Commell board:

   http://www.icp-epia.co.uk/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=99

but it's only 600MHz, however it has 512KB of cache - the Via ones only 
have 128KB, so that might make a little difference - My R&D systems at 533 
MHz and 64KB cache seem very capable of running a small offices asterisk 
needs - half a dozen handsets and a TDM400 card with 2 analogue lines 
doesn't seem to impose any load on them at all... (GSM transcoding does, 
however, but I've never tested them to their limits)

Gordon