[Gllug] Buying a switch (a sort of repost/recap on an old thread)

[Nix]

On 8 Feb 2010, Andy Millar said:

> On Mon, 2010-02-08 at 12:08 +0000, Richard Jones wrote:
>> Mmm, seems your logic here is right.  So the next question would be
>> what is a cheap, small, quiet PC that has 2-4 ethernet ports on it?
>
> http://www.soekris.com/net5501.htm

Seconded. I'm not sure 300 quid is 'cheap', but it's as silent and
low-power as they come.

One of these is my firewall, and one (without a case) is nailed inside
my parents' hallway cupboard as their firewall :)

Downsides: 100Mb/s networking only. Depends on a CPU at the end of its
life (the AMD Geode), so the next model will be rather different.
Depends on CF storage, which is rather old these days. No manual: the
manual that *is* available (online) is for another model and is slightly
inaccurate when applied to the net5501. Also you'd better be pretty
clued to understand what it's going on about. It's pure techspeak from
beginning to end :)

But the thing oozes clue: the build quality is lovely, all the
schematics are available (well, er, for the other model but the net5501
is quite similar, again), the mailing list is full of luminaries of
various sorts (mostly FreeBSD), and it's *built* to run free Unixes
(mostly FreeBSD, but Linux is quite happy with it). I just wish we had a
way to use the built-in AES engine with OpenSSL under Linux... FreeBSD
has a /dev/crypto driver for it, but the Linux kernel crypto driver
isn't made available to userspace. Silly.


(Video? Who needs video? You get a serial console and a little BIOS that
talks over it, a USB port and four 100Mb/s network connections. To bring
it up, preformat the flash card and sling it in, or netboot.)
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