Graves On SOHO Technology

There still seems to be a lot of interest in DIY Asterisk appliances. Make that DIY PBX appliances in general, because the Freeswitch folks are just as active in this regard. My prior article giving an overview of suitable target platforms continues to be well received, even six months after it was originally published.

One of the host platforms mentioned in that article was the HP range of thin clients. Every day I get an email from the HP SMB Outlet listing the refurbished and overstock offering du jour. In todays list I notice that they include a quantity of 24 HP T5735 thin clients offered for $ 149 each.

These little boxes would make great little DIY embedded PBX systems. Here are the specs:

• AMD Sempron 2100+ CPU clocked at 1 GHz
• 1 GB DDR-2 memory (1 SODIMM)
• 1 GB internal flash storage
• PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports
• 6 USB 2.0 ports
• On-board audio
• ATI Radeon X1250 graphics with support for up to 1920 x 1440, or up to 24 bit color depth
• 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet

These little beasts are fanless and only draw around 18 watts. There is also an expansion chassis available that allows the addition of a riser for one PCI card.

At $149 each these devices are cheaper than a net-top. Granted, they’re not quite as powerful as a new net-top…they’re plenty enough to host a SOHO PBX or small music server.

All VoIP and no play makes Michael a dull boy. My wife would argue that much of my VoIP-ish activity is play, but that’s another story. If you’ve been reading things around here for a bit you already know that we love our Squeezeboxen! When the music flows here, it flows through these, and we do have a few of them here and there.

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Some time ago I published a project about How To: DIY Music Server Using FreeNAS, SlimNAS and an H-P T5700. This remains one of the more popular items around here, generating over 6,000 page views in the past 12 months alone.

A couple of new posts to a related thread over in the forum at Small Net Builder points me to a new take on the project. Kevin Hanson has reworked it to address…How to: Building a Squeezebox Server for under $100… Yes, it can be done…

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Originally published July 21, 2008 at www.smallnetbuilder.com

By: Michael Graves

Date: July 21, 2008

From my first exposure to Slim Device’s original SliMP3 back in 2003 I was taken with the idea of streaming music throughout my house. The designers approach to this task I found very interesting. They literally give away an open source media streaming software intended for use on a file server. Then run their business by selling a dedicated hardware device to interface the music stream to a traditional stereo system.

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Well it took a couple of tries but I finally got my little SlimNAS server running with 512 MB of memory. I first tried a 1 GB stick of DDR-333 (PC2700), but the T5700 BIOS doesn’t deal with memory greater than 512 MB.

I next tried a 512 MB stick of DDR DDR-333 (PC2700) but that didn’t work either. The little T5700 simply didn’t boot. It never got past the BIOS splash screen.

Then Fedex delivered a 512 MB stick of DDR-266 (PC-2100) that I had mail ordered from www.zipzoomfly.com. That finally worked. So here’s the proof.

I’ve written up this most recent project of mine for the folks at www.smallnetbuilder.com. It’s a complete How-To that describes running FreeNAS, SlimNAS & SqueezeCenter on a recycled HP T5700 thin client. I also modify the T5700 by adding a 250 GB 2.5″ IDE drive installed internally. The result is a music server supporting my Squeezeboxes that consumes only 14 watts.

Update -the article went live this morning at http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30522/77/