Ah, Soekris, how wonderful are your boards? So wonderful that even the non-technical peeps I know like them. They are stable, rock-solid. Paired with m0nowall or pfsense they make a fine gateway device. Today's install was displacing a Linksys router that kept locking up on a regular basis; the little linksys just couldn't handle the traffic. And that's not unexpected, really, not on a network with as much traffic as is thrown at the router.
I suggested these peeps install a Soekris box running m0n0wall quite some time ago but they were not convinced the problem was with the router itself. They were partially correct. Multiple problems existed and were corrected along the way but the little Linksys was a problem, a big one in fact, and it was finally displaced today after regularly locking up once every 24 hours requiring a hard reboot.
Meanwhile, on the other "sister" network across the hall, the other network was humming along quite nicely using an old Soekris net4501, a box no longer produced. Heck, we even had IPv6 on that side in addition to everything else. I suggested the client purchase a net4801 but they wanted something "bigger", "faster" and "more expandable" so they went with a net5501-70. A good box, really, and it runs the basic PC version of m0n0wall. The setup was easy, though you still need to do the initial setup via the serial port so keep that in mind as nine pin serial connectors on computers aren't exactly commonplace any longer. Oh and with the net5501 the default com port speed is 9600 baud, not 19200 like the documentation would have you believe, so FYI there (9600, 8, N, 1, Hardware).
Once I had the box properly flashed it booted right up and we were off to the race for configuration which was very easy as we only, currently anyway, had one WAN connection and one LAN connection (note: I tried to install a Kingston 1 gig CF card initially but the Soekris failed to recognize it and boot from the card so I flashed a PNY 128 meg cards and it worked fine). Later we'll add another two networks to the box but that's down the road a bit.
Funny tid-bit that may only interest me: the only other device to have objected to (specifically) the Kingston 1 gig CF card were all Cisco 6509 Supervisor II modules. Other cards, even larger 2 gig card from different manufacturers, worked fine. Kingston did something weird with the 1 gig "white flower" CF cards. Everything else from cameras to PCs seems to love them however. Go figure.
I like the net5501-70, quite a bit in fact. I'm going to order one of my own so I can play with Askozia (PBX) and pfsense a bit. Heck, we may as well go crazy and check out FreeNAS while I'm at it. I'm sure I'll be loading up pictures when the time comes so stay tuned.
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