I bought this board with plans to use it as a router/wireless access point/web server. It handles this very well. It runs at a cool idling temperature and my setup uses only around 18 watts of power. However, there were a few hurdles I had to overcome along the way.

1) The board seems to be picky about memory. The specs said to use DDR2 400. I tried booting with 1GB of gskill, no luck. I was greeted with a screeching beep and no post screen. Next I tried a 512mb Corsair stick and it posted. This little board goes from touching the power button to loading the OS faster than any other board I’ve ever worked with.

2) This board did not like booting from a USB cd-rom drive. I had to change two settings in the bios to get this to work. One for USB storage legacy support, and then change the boot device priority NOT to CD-ROM but USB-CD-ROM. Then I also had to enable legacy USB keyboard support for my keyboard to be recognized.

Next I Installed Ubuntu Server 9.04 on a 2.5 hdd and rebooted. There were a few tweaks that needed to be made in order for the system to work the way I wanted.

1) I wanted to use the board as an access point so I chose a D-Link WDA-2320 wireless G PCI Card. It has the Atheros AR5212 chipset which supports Access Point/Master mode (Monitor and Injection also). In order to put the card in access point mode I had to tell ubuntu not to load the ath5k driver by placing the following at the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Blacklist ath5k

This might not have been needed but I also added to /etc/modules

ath_pci

which makes sure the madwifi drivers get loaded at boot time.

2) This board has a nasty speaker on it that makes a really loud annoying system beep so to take care of that I also added to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

blacklist pcspkr

Now with those things in place it was time to set up the routing. I installed hostapd to manage wireless connections. The only lines I had to edit in the config were interface, driver, bridge, and the WPA settings. Most tutorials tell you to put your wired and wireless networks on different subnets. I don’t like this proposal. I’d rather have my wired and wireless on the same subnet similar to most commercial wireless routers. To accomplish this, I created a bridge using the bridge-utils package, added my LAN and WLAN interface to the bridge. Then masqueraded all traffic from that bridge to my other interface (internet). I installed dnsmasq to hand out ips to everthing on the bridge. For details on setting up Shorewall to manage the three interfaces see my other post here.

Tags: J7F4K1G2E-PB, Jetway, Mini-ITX, Router, Ubuntu