[Nottingham] Cheapie Via C3 replacement?

[Martin]

Folks,

Any suggestions for...


I have a very old Via C3 mini-itx board that is doing sterling service
as a firewall/router and experimental Gentoo testbed. However, it only
has "USB 1" ports and only two of those even. The BIOS is also crazily
broken such that I've got to use an ancient 16MByte CF card to get it to
reliably boot. It also appears to test the memory in some sort of loop
many times over before randomly giving up to then finally boot... All
despite playing with the various BIOS settings... Otherwise, it works
well enough...

Has anyone got any suggestions for something similar that has or can
have two ethernet ports and 6 or more "USB 2" ports?

There's the various atom mini-itx boards but they appear very silly with
the present Intel chipsets whereby the CPU runs cool and the chipset
needs a heatsink and fan!

Preferably, something that can go diskless and fanless? :-)


Are there any AMD geode systems available or are they not a good idea?

Or any ARM-esq systems easily available?

Or any super-cheap abandonded netbooks that can be stripped down to the
motherboard?...


Any other ideas?

Anyone done anything similar lately?

Use HURD running on an array of Arduinos?... (OK... Perhaps not /that/
geekie!)

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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