Home Gateway Project 2008-2024

This is the continuing saga of a line of home gateway projects that were built around small form factor mini-ITX motherboards and running FreeBSD. There were several iterations, first the MSI Winboard 230 and then MSI Winboard 330 mini-ITX board with 2x1G Kingston DDR2-800 memory modules, an eventual pair of Hitachi 2.5" 500G 7200RPM 16MB cache drives, a Dlink DGE-530T 10/100/1000 PCI NIC (Marvell chip based Network Interface Card), and all housed in a IN-WIN BM648 mini-ITX case with 130 watt power and starting with FreeBSD 6.4 in late 2008. After maintaining my 10 year old Gateway Project, finally running FreeBSD 11.0 (released on Oct. 10, 2016), my In-Win case's power supply finally failed with no replacements available. So the story continued with a In-Win Chopin, a Gigabyte N3160N-D3V, two 4G DDR3L SO-DIMM modules and two HGST 1TB, 5400RMP/128M cache 2.5" drives and with FreeBSD 12.2-Release.

As we were arriving towards the end 2022, the Home Gateway Project shifted integrating a Samba Server that will share files with a Set Top Box, Android media player. Based on an Asus Prime B560M-A motherboard, and Intel i5-10400 (tenth gen) 2.9GHz 6-core processor, 4x8GB DDR4 RAM, an Apacer AS2280P4 256GB M.2 boot stick and 8x4TB WD40EFZX 'Red' NAS drives, all installed in a Innovision NAS case with 400W power supply. This project installed the current Release version, at the time, of FreeBSD 13.1.

All of the steps taken for this project may be found on these pages. If you find this of use, please feel free to leave me a comment.