I have finally gotten around to writing about progress on the Mini-ITX appliance. It’s built, has Fedora 11 on it, and I have a couple hardware related changes to make. One, is that the Mainboard shipped with a rather loud CPU fan. So I looked for a 40mm 4-pin fan with no luck, so I settled for the quietest 3-pin I could find. The other is that I neglected to get an antenna and pigtail for the wireless. It’s an Intel 4965 AGN Mini-PCI express adapter, and I had a b**** of a time getting it to associate with the wireless AP. Once I managed to get it to reliably associate using WPA_supplicant, I discovered that it would not transfer faster than 350Kbps. I should be getting 54Mbps, since the AP is a 2.4GHz G Linksys. AP web GUI (Tomato firmware) showed link quality of ~7 to ~12. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to have the antenna. I’m dense sometimes. So I’m waiting on shipment of those to items.
While I wait, I can share some pics. Here is the case I chose – an M350 universal from Mini-Box. 
It’s meant for fanless operation, since it’s perforated all over with air-flow holes, but I’m opting for a fan anyway. This is part of why the fan noise becomes an issue. Part of what sold me on this case, is that it has some great mounting options, one of which, is being able to mount to the back of a computer display that has the VGA screw holes exposed. So, since my display is propped up from the base on the bottom, and not screwed into the back, these are available. Great space saver. I went with a PicoPSU power supply that plugs into the 20-pin ATX port on the MB. Perfect for this compact case. 
Also shown is the 12V DC transformer and power cord. Another interesting feature of this case is the USB connectivity hidden behind the front panel. 
This could be used for an OS Image, like ESXi or a small Linux or FreeNAS etc. Very flexible. The Mainboard I chose has four USB ports as well. I chose an MSI IM-GM45, mainly because of the dual GbE ports. This whole solution leaves many options for DIY’ers to pack some serious functionality in a tiny enclosure. 
I really would have liked to have 1T 2.5″ SATA, but I could only find 500G. So I opted for a software RAID 0 instead. No redundancy. Though I intended for this to be a storage oriented appliance for safekeeping data, I think this is better suited for a small virtualization platform. I came across a Mini-ITX board out there with eight SATA connectors that I want to turn into a storage appliance. Maybe with FreeNAS on it. I just have to find a suitable case.
Components
