Hi My name is Wolfgang and I
am a “Youtube influencer” And as such, I’m not immune to
the so called “Youtuber curse” That’s when you upload a well researched
video, at least in your opinon, about a certain product, a build, or a solution,
a video that you spent a lot of time on... And then literally 20 minutes later
somebody comes in the comments and goes like “here’s a product that’s actually way
better and cheaper than what you chose”. And they’re right. Their
solution is in fact, much better, And somehow in all of your
research, you just missed it. You idiot! Long story short, in one of my videos I built
a gateway slash router for my home network. I spent around $200 on the parts and concluded
that that’s pretty much the price you have to pay. Then one of my viewers, Martin Borovansky,
suggested that I look into Fujitsu S920 – a thin client with a PCIe slot that
could be populated with an Ethernet card. Martin said that it could be had for 30
to 40 euros, so I started looking into it. After a short eBay search I found this
used S920 for just 22 euros, or 25 dollars. It came with 2 gigabytes of DDR3
RAM and a 2 gigabyte mSATA SSD, which should be more than enough
for running OpenWRT or OPNSense and the only catch is that it
was missing a power supply. So obviously I pulled the trigger
on it and it finally arrived. And today we’re gonna take a look at
this little computer, do some benchmarks, and see if you can save a ton
of money on a custom router. Spoiler alert – yes you can. So the computer arrived in a pretty good
condition, especially considering its age. Fujitsu’s FUTRO lineup of thin
clients came out back in 2015, so this computer is around 5
to 7 years old at this point. There are a few scuffs and scratches here and
there, and the power button is kinda mangled... But all in all , it’s a router, not a art
piece, so it doesn’t have to look pretty. I didn’t actually order a power supply for it
since I was positive that it takes 12 volts, but to my surprise, this bad boy
actually needs a 19 to 20 volt input and it refused to power on
with my 12 volt power supplies. I searched around the house and found this
60W Lenovo power supply with a square plug, which I decided to sacrifice. And after a little work, voilá, we
got a 20V barrel blug power supply! Don’t try this at home though, I had a
profesisonal electrician on the phone making sure that I’m not
gonna create a house fire. If you don’t have a electrician friend, you’ll need a 20V 3.25A barrel
jack power supply for this puppy and you can buy one online
for around 10 to 20 bucks. My monitor was in repair at
the moment of filming this, so I decided to use my PiKVM to test the computer. I flashed the Ubuntu 20.04 LiveCD on a USB drive, stuck it into the thin client and booted it up. The BIOS on that thing is the
oldschool Aptio BIOS, which we like, and it has a lot more settings than
you would for a device like this. After disabling the internal audio and a few
more things, I booted into the Ubuntu ISO. Turns out choosing Ubuntu for
that task was a big mistake. The embedded low power CPU plus
2 gigs of RAM meant that even getting Firefox to open felt
like fighting for my own life. It was then that I realized that I could
just flash OpenWRT onto a flash drive, boot into it, and then dd the
flash drive onto the internal SSD. While it turned out to be a
bit more complicated than that, since the SSD installed in that thing was
actually smaller than the flash drive, and using command line disk partitioning
tools is not something I’m used to, I eventually managed to do
it and boot into OpenWRT In my case, I also had to use legacy boot, because OpenWRT just wouldn’t
boot with UEFI for some reason. But before setting up OpenWRT, let’s open
this thing up and see what’s on the inside So here’s our motherboard, and as you can see, most of the space is taken by
the CPU and the CPU cooler. This is an embedded AMD chip, GX-415GA. It’s a quad core low TDP CPU with a 15W TDP, and unlike the Celeron J1900 in my current router,
it actually supports AES NI – which is a big plus. Speaking of the power consumption, I’ve measured the draw at the
wall with a Shelly Plug S, and the whole system never went past
the 15W mark – which is amazing. At idle and without a monitor
connected to the DisplayPort it draws around 6 and half watts – which is
dangerously close to the Raspberry Pi levels. For comparison, my current
DIY router consumes 12 to 14W and some mainstream routers like this FritzBox
can consume as much as 20 to 25 watts under load. Apart from the CPU itself, we also
have a low profile PCIe x4 slot, an mSATA slot for the boot
drive and a miniPCIe slot, which can be used for WiFi or 4G adapters. I’ll be taking out the smart card reader, since I
don’t need it and don’t want it drawing any power, and the speaker, because
I like my computers quiet. You’ll need a 90 degrees PCIe adapter
or a flexible riser to use the PCIe slot because of how thin this thing is, and you can buy one on eBay or
Aliexpress for around 5 to 10 bucks. You’ll also need a PCIe Ethernet card, and I can personally recommend this
Intel PRO 1000 quad Gigabit card. You can find them for around 15
dollars for the dual port version, or 25 to 40 dollars for the quad port version. Since the motherboard also has a miniPCIe slot, you can use a WiFi card or a
miniPCIe to Etherner adapter. Keep in mind the slot is only wired for
PCIe 2.0 x1, or 500 megabyte per second, although it should be enough for 5Ghz
WiFi, even considering the bus overhead. I’m feeling a little adventurous today, so
I’ll use this 10Gbit Mellanox ConnectX 3 card. OpenWRT has recently added the
drivers for it to the repositories, and I just really want to see
if this thing can do 10 gig. Now let’s put it back together Connect the SFP+ cable to the Mellanox card And see how it performs! Alright, so I just booted into OpenWRT, and the
first thing I’m gonna do is set a root password. I’m not using this machine
as an actual router yet, and my local network is firewalled,
but better safe than sorry. Next, I’m going to install the
drivers for the Mellanox card. The package name is kmod-mlx4-core, and the kernel module should be loaded pretty
much immediately after you install the package. Finally, I’m going to change
the network configuration and set both internal and external
Ethernet ports to the “WAN” configuration, so that they get their IP via DHCP; and allow
external access to the router via the WAN ports. Needless to say, do not do any of this if you’re
actually running this as an Internet-facing router I’m only doing it to run some benchmarks. After restarting the network and the
firewall, I’m gonna SSH into the machine. We’re gonna launch the iperf3
server in daemon mode and open htop so that we can see how heavy the
network transfer is on the CPU. And now, let’s run an iperf3 benchmark! As you can see, we’re
getting 6 gigabit per second! Not 10, but still, I expected much less. The CPU gets pretty much
hammered by the iperf transfer, since it has to push 6
gigabit of traffic per second. Surprisingly though, the PC itself doesn’t
really get warm during the benchmark, which is nice I guess. Needless to say, this Fujitsu S920 should have no
issues running multiple Gigabit file transfers, and maybe even 2.5 gig. Let me know if that’s something you
want me to test, since I’m planning to use this machine as my main
router and see how it holds up. Finally, the price. Once again, I want to
emphasize how cheap this whole setup is. The box itslef costed me 22 euros, like
I mentioned, but let’s say I got lucky – the usual price for those on used marketplaces
is around 30 to 40 euros, or 45 dollars – and they usually come with a power supply. You’ll also need a short
PCIe riser, for 5 dollars, and a PCIe NIC, for around 15 to 35 dollars. So it’s actually realistic to get a
really solid and low power firewall or router box for your home
network for as little as 50 bucks. And even in the worse case scenario, with
a quad Ethernet NIC and a Wifi adapter, you won’t spend more than $100 on it. For that money you get a really nice, small and
power efficient machine that can run OpenWRT, OPNSense or IPFire and has support for AES-NI, which is definitely
a plus for anything that concerns encryption. For comparison, the appliance boxes sold on
AliExpress cost anywhere between 160 and 200€, and that’s for a barebones version. If you want to get one with an SSD and
RAM, you’ll have to pay 200 to 230€. One last thing that I would like to
mention is that Fujitsu Futro S920 is not the only cheap thin client
that you can use as a rouer. Another good option would be
Dell Wyse machines or HP T620. Just make sure that the thin client you’re interested in either has a
second NIC or a PCIe slot. Patrick, who runs a Youtube channel slash blog called ServeTheHome has a whole
series called “TinyMiniMicro” that features small form factor
computers that can be used in a homelab. So if you’re interested in those
devices, make sure to check it out.
