Re: Power savings and trusting Linux firewall

["Ward Vandewege" <user=150@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 07:45:15PM -0700, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote: 
>> Yep. I've got two of those in production as firewalls. They are at least 
>> twice as expensive as the pcengines units. Also, anything but the new-ish 
>> soekris 55xx series is an order of magnitude slower than the alix boards. 
> 
> The Soekris boxes have much better BIOSes (better supported by / supporting 
> at least the FreeBSD boot loader). 

Well, that's until we've got coreboot running on the alix.2 and alix.3 
series, which should not take too long. It already works on alix.1c. 

> They also have other neat things like a 
> PCI slot, 

Alix.1c has a full length pci slot + a minipci slot. The various other alix 
boards have at least one minipci slot. 

> a better RS-232 port, 

Uhm - better how? 9 pins exposed to an external serial connector, 115200bps - 
does it get better than that? 

> GPIO ports etc etc. 

All alix boards have a (large) GPIO header. 

> The advantages of the PC Engines boards are 1) cost and 2) awesomely small 
> case. 

I'd argue that the PC Engines boards have all the advantages you listed above 
as well, short of the BIOS perhaps for now. 

> Both the Soekris and the PC Engines boards are super fun though.  I usually 
> use them as small routers or firewalls with FreeBSD ("self-built" with 
> NanoBSD or via pfSense or m0n0wall).   The new generation (Alix and 5501) 
> don't seem to have any trouble keeping a 100Mbit link busy. 

I see the same; I can basically forward/firewall traffic pretty much at wire 
speed on the alix2c3. And that's with Voyage Linux (http://linux.voyage.hk/) 
which is a Debian Etch-based distro for boards like the alix and soekris 
ones. 

Thanks, 
Ward. 

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