[conspire] Quiet, Freedom-compatible NAT/firewall/misc box?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> If going x86, also consider the Lenovo Q180/Q190.
> 
> $220 on Amazon, easy to blow away Windows (tell the bios enable CSM,
> legacy only)
> 
> But no obvious way to add ethernet except USB.
> 
> I've got about 50 of these buggers deployed as workstations.  Much
> more reliable so far than the Zino HDs and the Zotac AD02 and AD10s
> I'd been buying before them.
> 
> Some guys in the forums say they eat 17 watts- haven't measured
> myself.  Not fanless, but people say they run pretty quiet if you keep
> the fan to 40% pwm.


These Lenovos are pretty amazingly cost-effective for the many people
who don't care about wired networking, and don't mind topping out at 4GB
on system RAM.  For the target market of home theatre PC people, this is
just the thing - and one can imagine many good applications with Linux,
too.

So, congrats on grabbing a few, as I'm sure you'll find good use for
them.

Mostly a me thing, but for the next machine I buy or build, I'm going to
go a bit out of my way to avoid hardware-based limitations that might
prove annnoying over the next half-decade or more.  I've managed to do
this several times in the past, through a combination of some care,
instinct, and some amount of dumb luck.

In that regard, looking at the Lenovo HTPC boxes you mention, the lack
of wired LAN stands out, but the hard limit of 4GB RAM about as much.
Why?  Because this is the golden age of virtualisation software, and
something like the ASRock min-iTX / AMD Kabini bundle I mentioned wins
IMO even though it draws a few more watts, because it can be expanded to
32GB RAM, which opens up whole new categories of possibilities
unavailable with RAM in the 1GB range like a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B or
most of the other SFF (small form factor) PCs that top out at 2-4 GB.

As you say, the only way you can get wired networking on the Lenovos is
USB-ethernet things (because there's neither an expansion slot nor room
for a card).

All of which are eminently reasonable compromises given the target uses
for the Lenovos.

I have a couple of cynical suspicions about the holes in the market
where it seems like things like a good, Linux-friendly, modestly
expandable SFF computer based on things like AMD Beema/Mullins SoCs 
ought to be:

Suspicion #1 (conspiracy-leaning):  Intel is so determined to shut AMD
out of the small-device market that they are literally financially
subsidising OEMs' choice of uninspiring and limited crud like the
'Atom'-class Bay Trail SoC platform.

Suspicion #2 (less conspiratorial):  AMD suffers because it's been
crowded into price competition with really anaemic, low-spec ARM-based
boards best suited to smartphones and low-end tablets that are so cheap
that the OEMs just aren't willing to pay for better performance and
fewer limits.

#2 would explain both why it's so difficult to _find_
enthusiast-friendly (i.e., not an HP Pavillion sealed-tight mini-something) 
units based on the newer and truly amazing lov-power, high-perfoamnce
AMD SoCs, _and_ why low-power computing has been almost completely
abandoned to stripped-down ARM offerings with all their
proprietary-software dependencies and utter lack of standard kernel
support, even after _many_ years of ARM-based Linux computing.

That's why I've finally decided that the smartest compromise in 2015 is
to retreat a bit on my quest for the fewest possible watts from the
wall, and get something like the ASRock min-iTX / AMD Kabini bundle
that fleshes out to 32GB, has _no_ annoying hardware limitations, 
has zero proprietary-software problems, requirement for out-of-tree 
kernel patchsets with an unknown future, or need for strange one-off
bootloader setups.  And yet, _still_ manages to be low-power for
reasonable values of that term.


BTW, somewhere in the garage I have a Kill-A-Watt unit that you plug
between the AC wall outlet and something whose real-world wattage draw
you want to measure.  I need to start using that to get some real
figures instead of fibs on spec sheets.


BTW#2, I'm a _little_ surprised that few of the people who've
recommended ARM-based Linux computers to me, including but not limited
to the several Raspberry Pi models, has been particularly bothered by
the bit about being totally dependent on out-of-tree kernel patchsets --
which when I finally noticed it was big news to me, and at least a
yellow flag on the play if not quite a red one.

But I'm guessing the explanation is that most people just take a distro
kernel and use it without even bothering to think about what produced
it, whether it has a likely future, and if lags in the support for newer
kernel.org versions might not create huge security problems in the
future.  For most folks, the kernel's just a thing that's there, and
doesn't merit that sort of pondering.

(That is not, of course, to say that these aren't excellent offerings,
especially the Pis.  But they have long-term issues that aren't obvious
to many.)