[Sussex] Soekris question for Steve D

[Steve Dobson]

On Sun, 2006-02-26 at 21:50 +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 26, 2006 at 08:27:08PM +0000, Steve Dobson wrote:
> > However, if you buy the net4801 (rather than the net4501 - I have both)
> > you can make use of the disk interface and put a laptop HDD in the box
> > too.  You need the hard disk mounting kit to do it but at 9 Euros it is
> > a very small price to pay - especially if you already have a spare
> > laptop disk.
> 
> IMHO if you're going to put an unreliable (relatively) powered
> moving part into it then why bother buying a soekris in the first
> place?
> 
> It's a single board computer with no fans or other moving parts.
> Once you move away from that you may as well just buy something from
> linitx or repurpose some more conventional old pc hardware as that
> will be vastly cheaper.

A valid point.  Any system is only as reliable as it's weekest part.
The HDD is a trade off between reliablity and convenance.

However, Ronan asked about my Debian install.  Debian is a distro that
is not designed to run in flash, it is designed to run off a hard disk.
It writes back to the file system to much for flash.  To run Debian on
the system you really need a disk system supporting you. This is the
best way in my experence - it has the most fiddleability of the various
setups I've tried.  It also means your logs survice a crash - like on
power failure.

If want you want is a no moving parts firewall for your home network,
that just does the job, then one of those Lynksys WRT54G (which runs
Linux IIRC) is cheaper.  But you don't get to do much fiddling.  If just
want a firewall on a Soekris then I would recomend M0n0wall, it needs
<10MB of flash, but again - no real fiddling can be done.  The only
problem I've had with that is NATing some of the Window's VPN packets -
the non-TCP/UDP ones.  The new version of M0n0wall I think has fixed
that but I haven't tried it.

But there is more to computing that just getting it to do a job.  If you
want to run a firewall that you can have complete control over then
neither the Linksys or M0n0wall provide that.  Debian does, but in my
experence you need a disk for that.

Steve

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