Mini-ITX Cigar Box PC

If you have never seen a mini-itx, it is essentially a miniature form factor motherboard packed with a bunch of onboard components. The coolest thing about the mini-itx is that you can cram it into the unlikeliest of places. Just take a look at all the home built PCs at mini-itx.com. Well, I figured one of these suckers would make a perfect Endian Firewall for my house and look cool too! I could put my computer and my wife's on one one subnet, my kids computer with a gazillion content filters on another and my public access servers on yet another. In addition, I could try my hand at building one of those cool looking cigar box PCs like on min-itx.com. So, I got a studly looking black cigar box on Ebay and dremmeled the heck out of it to make room for all the components, check out my cigar box PC pictures here. However, during that time, my regular Linksys router was starting to have fits. By the way, those things suck ever since Cisco bought Linksys. Don't buy one unless you can get one of the old versions from before Cisco neutered them or at least get the Linux version that only seems to be available online.

With the Linksys going into conniptions, the wife was complaining about our phone service (Vonage), our internet connection, and the frequent need for router reboots (those things don't handle peer to peer too well you know ;-) So I needed that Endian appliance in place, and fast. To do that, I just slapped a couple nics into an old pc and booted up the Endian firewall. Fifteen minutes later, my Linksys was thanked for its brief and painful service and relegated to providing wireless access to the Kid's subnet in my house. It has been solid as a rock.

So... Now what to do with my half built cigar box? I know, I'll build a MythTV server and have the Cigar Box prominantly and proudly displayed in my living room....

Fast forward a few weeks and I havent even touched the MythTV config, and a few weeks later we went through a huge TV upgrade. We are 100% HD and even have an HD DVR/Tuner from Comcast. It seems the MythTV idea is now obsolete or at least not useful without sinking a ton more dough into it to make it HD capable.

So now I have a dilemmna, is there a market out there for a cool looking, mini-itx form factor, cigar box PC? I guess we'll see, I've listed it on Ebay if anybody is interesetd. Check it out!