[nycbug-talk] Soekris

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jun 6, 2004, at 11:12 PM, Josh McCormack wrote:

> Pete Wright wrote:
>
>> Hey all,
>>    I am thinking of purchasing one of these boxes for my home network:
>> http://www.soekris.com/
>> The model I am thinking of purchasing is the:
>> *net4801-50
> <snip>
>> Cheers,
>>    Pete
>
> For way too long now I've been planning, researching and talking with 
> lots of people to set up a network security business, focusing at 
> least partially on wireless and the small business market.
>
> I'm going to be selling Soekris 4801 boxes with some optional 
> hardware, running OpenBSD, OpenVPN and Snort (as a prevention system, 
> writing to pf). Possibly some other stuff. My goal is to have 
> everything be FOSS and publicly available hardware, and to have the 
> value come from service - I'm not locking anyone into anything 
> propreitary, those who can't afford to work with me or who have the 
> technical expertise can build it and manage it themselves. Target is 
> non-technical SOHO market mainly, but also companies with a respect 
> for OpenBSD etc. but don't want to handle  maintenance themselves.
>
> Since the business is really about service, and the technically adept 
> are not a target, I can only benefit from being open with people like 
> all of you. So if anyone is interested in working together on how to 
> get all this software to work together, I'd love to share and learn. 
> If you're interested I can also organize bulk purchases of the 
> equipment, so we can try to keep our costs down.

Sounds like a good idea.  I've been interested in stuff like this 
(extending FOSS to build consumer grade solutions) for a good while.  
I'd definitely be interested in the software end of things.  It'll be a 
good idea to have a few developers involved that can fix bugs and 
submit patches to the software that these devices use, as well as 
develop new software for these devices.  Surely you'll also need to 
develop some sexy management tools (unless I'm completely missing an 
existing project that is just that), and there's a lot of work that can 
be done in the FOSS world as far as autodiscovery and autoconfiguration 
goes as well.

-bob
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