[olug] single board computers

[Jim]

Nice to hear someone local has had good luck with the Soekris. I am 
planning on ordering a NET4801 next week for use as a firewall 
platform. I have looked at flashdist and OpenSoekris and am looking 
forward to trying to working through the differences with them.

I have been having better luck with pf vs the PIX with some NAT 
situations I have been in. Plus, when you break out the cost of a PIX 
vs a Soekris with OpenBSD, it really becomes rather cost effective.

The only thing I don't like about OBSD based firewalls is the moving 
parts, the Soekris seems to take care of that.

Other item I have been keeping my eye on is mini-itx board 
(http://www.mini-itx.com/). I have seen some models with onboard CF 
slots, that look sort of interesting.

Jim


On Nov 29, 2003, at 8:52 AM, neal rauhauser wrote:

>
>    A few days ago I got a Soekris NET4511 single board computer. The 
> machine has 64 meg of memory, a 486/100 processor, two ethernet ports, 
> a miniPCI and a cardbus slot, and a compact flash slot. Mine came in a 
> steel box 1" x 5" x 8" and the box is predrilled to take two RP-TNC 
> bulkhead connectors - this is the same style of pigtail as used by 
> Linksys and Cisco access points. It can take wall wart power or power 
> over ethernet.
>
>    I used the OpenSoekris configuration script on an OpenBSD 3.3 
> system and I generated one 64 meg and one 128 meg image. I loaded the 
> images to compact flash using a USB flash reader attached to my Redhat 
> 9.0 workstation. I had some trouble at first but once I updated the 
> board to ComBIOS 1.22 everything worked fine.
>
>   The miniPCI slot has many uses but Soekris sells the VPN1211 - a 
> miniPCI crypto accelerator with a Hi/fn 7951 processor. The little 486 
> backed with one of these cards is roughly as fast as a Pentium 166 for 
> handling crypto operations.
>
>   Soekris has come out with the NET4801 - a 266 MHz Pentium class 
> processor with 256 meg of dram. The VPN1411 with a Hi/fn 7955 will be 
> in production by the end of the year - roughly 10x faster than the 
> VPN1200 series.
>
>   IBM makes compact flash sized hard disks up to 2.2 gig. I think the 
> 1.0 gig model is $160 and these will fit in all Soekris machines. The 
> 4801 can be equipped with a 2.5" IDE drive carrier.
>
>
>
>   I've deployed Alvarion Breeze Access II frequency hopping 2.4 GHz 
> radios, Lucent AP1000, Cisco AP352 and BR352 802.11b gear for access 
> and I've used Adtran Tracer, WiLan AWE120, Aperto, Proxim Tsunami, and 
> Proxim Quickbridge for backbone links. I must say that I am completely 
> and utterly sick of the crap being put out for access gear and the 
> lower end backbone gear is equally frustrating to use - the only thing 
> I've named that I don't utterly hate is the Tsunami line and even 
> those have their moments.
>
>
>
>    If anyone else is looking at doing a wireless project and would 
> prefer to use something that did not suck I'd be happy to help bring 
> you up to speed on the Soekris platform. If you've got an idea for a 
> single board computer project let me know - I'm going to have spare 
> units sitting around and I'd like to see what fun stuff other people 
> find to do with single board computers.
>
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>
> -- 
> mailto:neal at lists.rauhauser.net
> phone:402-301-9555
> IM:Neal R Rauhauser
> "After all that I've been through, you're the only one who matters,
> you never left me in the dark here on my own" - Widespread Panic
>
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