[TriLUG] looking for advice for physically small PC for router, dhcpd/named, firewall

[Chess Griffin]

On 8/2/07, Greg Brown <gwbrown1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good point, a couple years go Evil Mike posted something in his blog on a
> conf file in OpenBSD that would essentially make the OS read-only and not
> write to the CF card.  He was using the old OcuStat (from Oculan) hardware..
> grrr... where is that link....
>
>

Another vote for a Soekris.  I bought a used 4801 with 3 extra LAN
ports off ebay recently and have OpenBSD installed on a CF card.  I
followed the directions here to mount everything read only:

http://www.dbnet.ece.ntua.gr/~adamo/howto/OpenBSD/OpenBSD-3.9_Soekris-4801.html

As to the sis(4) throughput issues, I know the OpenBSD team has put in
a lot of work on that driver in -CURRENT (actually 4.2 just went into
beta).  Per the changelog, http://openbsd.org/plus.html

"Enable interrupt holdoff on DP83816 sis(4) chips. Significantly
improves performance of such devices under load."

More discussion about the sis(4) driver for OpenBSD 4.2 are in the
comments to this article here:
http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20070802060056&mode=flat

My Soekris is only being used on my home network, so I can't speak to
its performance under heavy load, but I noticed a real increase in my
traffic speed after switching from my WRT54G.

Chess

-- 
Chess Griffin
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http://www.chessgriffin.com