Firebox X Core Fan Replacement

voultar

Hey guys,

The small 3 (I believe 40mm) fans that exhaust air out of the rear chassis of the Firebox are awfully loud. It sounds like my Firewall is about to hit mach 4!

Can you any of you recommend a more quiet replacement for these? I'm going to do the same thing for my Linksys Gbit switch.

Thanks!

chpalmer

You can slow those down with a little program by Stephenw10.

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,32013.msg270534.html#msg270534

http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,32013.msg187336.html#msg187336

stephenw10

The fans on the X-Core box, like Voultar's X700, are non controllable unfortunately.
You can add some manual fan controllers or just use fixed resistors of suitable value. Those boxes had to be able to run at 100% in a hot rack so if you're not doing that, like most, you can run will less cooling.
The CPU fan is louder I seem to recall and easier to replace. If your box is not in a stack you can switch it with a regular axial fan cut a hole in the lid. Somewhat extreme I guess.

There is quite a lot of info in the X700 thread because many people have found the fans to be unacceptably loud.

Steve

chpalmer

Ah- sorry to get your hopes up! :P

voultar

Thanks guys, I appreciate the input.

The Firebox will be under relatively low system utilization. It's in my home network, which consists of maybe 4 active nodes at any given time. However, there will be a few services running on the back-end that may want to draw a bit of power.

I can't remember, but are the Pentium 3 chips equipped with a thermal probe? When I step the fans down, I'd like to the monitor the temp of the core through PFsense.

stephenw10

There is thermal monitoring available via the superIO chip. You can access that from pfSense via the command line with mbmon.

You have to install it from the CLI, it's a FreeBSD package. If you're running a full install there's no need to remount the files system so just do:

[2.0.2-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(6): pkg_add -r ftp://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/i386/packages-8.1-release/Latest/mbmon.tbz

then do:

[2.0.2-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(7): rehash

this is so the FreeBSD knows where to find the binary.
Then:

[2.0.2-RELEASE][root@pfsense.fire.box]/root(8): mbmon -I

Temp.= 42.0, 16.5, 54.5; Rot.= 5818, 5625, 5232
Vcore = 1.15, 2.35; Volt. = 3.36, 5.05, 12.10, -11.96, -0.62

Your values will be different from mine since that's from an X-Peak box. Also mbmon lists all the SuperIO chip values even though some are not connected to a sensor. Those will always show wildly wrong! ;)

Steve

voultar

Thanks Steve!!! I really appreciate that.