[TriLUG] using soekris boxes and CF cards (OpenBSD)

[Jason Faulkner]

On 12/5/06, Chris Bullock <cgbullock at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Was wondering if anyone was using Soekris http://soekris.com hardware to
> do any linux or *bsd deployments.  We are looking to replace our pc based
> firewalls and routers with the Soekris appliances.  Another question is
> how good are CF cards when it comes to reads/writes for log files, this is
> gonna be a firewall/vpn application and there will be constant writes to
> the CF card and don't want failures, since I am replacing spinning disks
> which we all know fail.
> Regards,
> Chris



Be very, very careful. We deployed two CARP'd Soekrii in our production
environment (pushing an average of 25MBit/s, spiking to 70MBit/s) and the
low bus bandwidth killed us. They're nifty little boxes, they just have very
little capacity. A fair warning. We're actually replacing our two Sokeris
routers with Dell Poweredge servers running openbsd -- the failover of CARP
mitigates the fear of failure of the servers -- I'd rather replace a Dell in
an emergency than to deal with the overloaded router issues I've been having
over the last month.


-- 
Jason Faulkner
http://oldos.org