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DOCUMENTATION 》 DIY TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device with Intel Celeron Mini PC

Build a TOFFEE WAN Optimization Hardware Appliance [CDN]

Here is a step-by-step DIY to build your own Intel based Mini PC WAN Optimization Device with TOFFEE. I chose this below Intel Celeron Mini PC since it is fan-less aluminium case and as well it has 2 dedicated inbuilt Gigabit Ethernet ports. You can use one for LAN Network and one for WAN Network.

Unboxing pictures of the same:
TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device
TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

Here is the view of the device. You can see here it has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Although it has Gigabit Ethernet, since this hardware configuration is limited, you can use similar device to process (optimize) up to 30-50Mbps of WAN Network via TOFFEE. I printed with my CASIO Label printer and labeled each Ethernet port as shown below as: LAN and WAN

NOTE: Labelling the Ethernet ports is quite important since if it is wrongly configured in TOFFEE, it can cause complete failure of network connectivity. As it may leak TOFFEE optimized packets into LAN Network.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device [CDN]

This device which I got came with a white high-quality plastic stand just the way you find in many old D-link and Belkin Wifi routers. Along with it they have included the power-supply adapter and 2x Wifi Antennas as you can see below.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

If you open the device you can find the board inside. As you can see it came with a laptop DDR3L RAM, Wifi Card to which external Antennas can be connected. For storage (or your TOFFEE Firmware) you can either connect a standard Laptop 2.5'' HDD or SSD drive or you can choose to use the mSATA SSD drive. I purchased a tiny 32GB mSATA drive. This standard Ubuntu x86-64 Desktop fits in this mSATA drive. And as well there is lot of extra storage you get to install TOFFEE and any optional debugging tools such as Wireshark and so on. Although you cannot use a 32GB drive to compile any Ubuntu kernel since the SSD storage space is quite limited.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device [CDN]

The CPU is thermally bonded to the outer aluminium MiniPC case. So when the device is powered on, the case slightly heats up.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device [CDN]

Here are the external pictures of the MiniPC fully assembled.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

As I mentioned above since the case is made with aluminium, it will naturally dissipate the heat generated by the CPU as well in case if you choose to use any standard 2.5'' notebook SSD or HDD drive. Here are heat vents behind on the back cover so that there is some natural airflow.

You can find the bottom cover also includes small silicone bushes so that you can keep this horizontal on a table or fix it in the plastic stand (included in the package) and place it vertical. In my opinion placing it vertical as shown below is the best choice since it allows uniform airflow and moreover the device looks cool as you can see below.

TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

Here is its other view where you can see its ports. You can connect standard Monitor via VGA port or via HDMI port. You can also connect your USB mouse and keyboard. It has also USB3.0 ports.

10 TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

At its top near the antennas it has provision to connect USB storage, microSD and SD-card. These slots are quite handy if you choose to extend its storage temporarily with these options. I am not sure you can connect a USB keyboard or mouse to this port. Since when I checked it worked only with USB storage flash drives only.

11 TOFFEE WAN Optimization Device

Here are the technical specs of this Intel MiniPC:

  • Intel Celeron C1037U Processor (fanless)
  • 2GB DDR3 Laptop RAM (DDR3L)
  • 32GB mSATA SSD
  • 2x Gigabit Ethernet
  • Wifi port
  • 2x USB3.0 ports
  • 12v DC Power-supply

You can find the TrueBench performance benchmarks of this processor HERE which is around 226311120. This means you can use this safely to optimize 30-40Mbps WAN network speeds with TOFFEE. For more details about this processor refer official IntelĀ® CeleronĀ® Processor 1037U (2M Cache, 1.80 GHz) Specifications.

Installing TOFFEE:
Kindly refer the TOFFEE Documentation HERE. This MiniPC is a standard x86-64 device so you can follow same installation steps.



Suggested Topics:


TOFFEE - WAN Optimization


Categories

💎 TOFFEE-MOCHA new bootable ISO: Download
💎 TOFFEE Data-Center Big picture and Overview: Download PDF


Recommended Topics:

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My sample Wireshark packet capture files for research ↗
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PiPG - Raspberry Pi Network Packet Generator ↗
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PiPG is a powerful and yet simple Raspberry Pi Network Packet Generator. With PiPG you can now fabricate custom network packets and send via any Network Interface. Supports all kinds of standard Network Ports (Linux Kernel driver generated) such as Physical Network Interface ports, and an array of virtual ports such as loopback, tun/tap, bridge, etc. indispensable tool for: Network Debugging, Testing and Performance analysis Network Administrators Students Network R&D Protocol Analysis and Study Network Software Development Compliance Testing Ethical Hackers you can generate the following test traffic: L2-Bridging/Slow protocols: STP, LACP, OAM, LLDP, EAP, etc Routing protocols: RIPv1, RIPv2, IGMPv1, IGMPv2, OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP, HSRP, VRRP, etc Proprietary protocols: CISCO, etc Generic: IPv4 TCP/UDP, etc Malformed random packets

Why TOFFEE is forked from TrafficSqueezer ↗
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Watch on Youtube - [466//1] 158 VLOG - TOFFEE WAN Optimization Software Development live update - 6-Nov-2016 ↗

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Earlier the TOFFEE is intended to work on IoT devices, Satellite Networks, branch office/SOHO deployments. In most cases the users may deploy just one or couple of TOFFEE devices per site. But in the case of TOFFEE-DataCenter, users can scale-up deploying the same in multiple servers in a sort of distributed cluster computing scenario. Besides the core TOFFEE-DataCenter components (such as packet processing engine/framework), I need to do lot of changes in its Graphical User Interface (GUI) too to address these new requirements.



Research :: Optimization of network data (WAN Optimization) at various levels:
Network File level network data WAN Optimization


Learn Linux Systems Software and Kernel Programming:
Linux, Kernel, Networking and Systems-Software online classes


Hardware Compression and Decompression Accelerator Cards:
TOFFEE Architecture with Compression and Decompression Accelerator Card [CDN]


TOFFEE-DataCenter on a Dell Server - Intel Xeon E5645 CPU:
TOFFEE-DataCenter screenshots on a Dual CPU - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5645 @ 2.40GHz - Dell Server