I’ve had this idea of virtualising my home router for quite a while now because I always liked the idea of having everything in one box as it just seemed all very neat and tidy and fits in with modern hyper converged infrastructure and such.
I present, the Janky, drilled out, really not meant to be. EntiSrv.
Entisrv began life as a humble HP Proliant ML110 G7 server bought off ebay with dead internals. I bought it at the time to host my gaming PC and it did for quite a few months. I originally had a BeQuiet ShadowRock 3 cooler than was too tall to fit inside the case so I bent the side panel to try and get it to fit. I didn’t
So now I have to wrestle with it to get it on every time. I switched out to passive CPU cooler on my 10th Gen i3 at the time and that was one of the best configurations I’ve had with a PC.
The HP Proliant case needs extensive work to make everything fit correctly and isn’t really an easy change but it is possible. You need to drill through the metal standoffs that hold the original cooler in, replace the fans. Replace the power button, and change the headers on the USB ports on the front because they’re also non standard.
The biggest pain was the hard drive mounting. It’s an MATX case with 4 Toolless 3.5" bays on sleds for a cheapish case it’s almost unbeatable, but the backplane is preconfigured for SAS which is fine if you’re using 3.5" inch drives but I’m using 2.5 Drives so you will need to drill the rivets out and pry the side up to get the back off… but it is possible. Just a pain.
The day Wendell posted the first forbidden router video was the day all my parts finally arrived, and because of my job being a pain with timing. It’s took until today to finally get around to doing it and I’m still not finished because i need to install the network card inside of my Workstation. I’m running Windows Server 2022 Datacentre and running PFSense through HyperV, It seems really straight forward to set up and I hope it’s as reliable as the dusty old Dell Vostro that has been my router for the better part of a year.
EntiSrv is built up of all used components, because I’m cheap.
EntiSrv Config
- HP Proliant Case
- Ryzen 7 1700
- OG Wraith Spire (Copper Slug and 3D Text)
- 16GB Unbuffered ECC RAM
- Asrock B450M Pro4
- Seagate 600 Pro 256GB SSD
- Seagate SAS 900GB HDD’s x4
- LSI HBA
- Intel Dual Port 10Gigabit Network Adapter
- Very Specific Broadcom Dual Port PCIE 1X Network Adapter
- FSP 500W PSU
I’m pretty proud of EntiSrv so far other than it seems some of the RAM might need pulled because 8.1GB of it is Hardware reserved, but I’ll just follow up for whatever solution I end up finding to this problem.
