[nycbug-talk] building home firewalls out of soekris boxen

[Siobhan Patricia Lynch]

We've been using Acrosser boards for our product - Soekris and the PCEngines stuff was too slow for what we're doing. (An integrated security product with what is essentially many jails running - except due to some capabilities that FreeBSD doesn't have *yet* (due in 8.0-C) we're using OpenSolaris).

The Acrosser boards are celeron 1.5 GHz with 1G of onboard RAM and uses an external miniide hdd.

They're not bad.

-Trish 
-- 
Siobhan Patricia Lynch


-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net>

Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2008 00:51:11 
To:"Jerry B. Altzman" <jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com>
Cc:NYCBUG <talk at lists.nycbug.org>
Subject: Re: [nycbug-talk] building home firewalls out of soekris boxen


On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Jerry B. Altzman wrote:
>
>> Howdy,
>>
>> Anyone local here spend much time *still* with Soekris boxes?
>
> Never played with them, but I have a PCEngines Alix box on the way to setup
> with pfsense for a client:
>
> http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60&products_id=492

Just to follow-up, it arrived this week and I just installed PFSense on
it.  Very neat hardware, pretty zippy too for 500MHz.  The 256MB RAM seems
like enough - pfsense (embedded version) throws /tmp and /var in memory
filesystems.  I did need to upgrade the BIOS out of the box to make
FreeBSD happy, but there was an image with FreeDOS, the new BIOS and the
flash utility on the PCEngines site.

My only other problem was that my CF writer turned out to be junk so I had
to let RatShack gouge me for a new one...

If anyone has any questions about the hardware, let me know.

Charles

> It seemed like a much better value than Soekris.
>
> Just thought I'd throw that out there.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles
>
>> I'm thinking of building a new firewall or two for the home, I'd like to
>> try something OTHER than OpenWRT (since I already have a nice wireless
>> gateway, thankyouverymuch...) and the little boxes just ... appeal to me.
>>
>> Comments? Praises? Brickbats?
>>
>> Either post here, or send to me & I'll summarize back.
>>
>> Thanks!
>>
>> //jbaltz
>> --
>> jerry b. altzman  jbaltz at 3phasecomputing.com  +1 718 763 7405
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at lists.nycbug.org
>> http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>
>
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