On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 02:38:43PM -0500, Christopher Sean Hilton wrote: > Is anyone aware of an equivalent for the Soekris Net 5501-70. I'm looking > to prototype an OpenBSD border gateway that offers web proxy capabilities > through squid cache but squid is a bit of a memory hog and I'd like to have > something with a Gig of RAM. Power footprint is a consideration which is > why the Soekris is at the top of the list.
I started off looking at Soekris but, to be honest, thought they were expensive given their lack of horsepower. After a lot of hunting, I ended up with a Tranquil (http://www.tranquilpc.co.uk/) T7, which is a passively cooled Intel Atom solution. Depending on where you site it, you might want to fiddle with its positioning to maximise its ability to cool itself (I found that if I floor mounted it, raising it half an inch above the floor meant it ran much cooler; I suspect the available wall mount would have a similar beneficial effect), It works fine with OpenBSD, draws very little power, can be ordered in a "bare bones" version (sans OS etc.), and is very well engineered. As with most Atom machines, it's a little sparse on the peripherals, but adding a USB NIC or two would probably do the trick for most gateway purposes. Laurie -- http://tratt.net/laurie/ -- Personal http://fetegeo.org/ -- Free text geocoding http://convergepl.org/ -- The Converge programming language
