On the Soekris front, my experience:
- virtually bomb-proof. I manage to break a 5501 once by plugging in a
48V power supply rather than 12V. It failed a couple of days later.
- bad for I/O. As routers with OpenBSD, the 5501 tops out at around
25Mbps of throughput, the 4801s at around 20, the 4501s at 10. I tracked
this to issues with PCI handling - the CPUs do PCI emulation, there is
no hardware control
- Ethernet ports - the chipsets vary between the different units, as I
recall, the 4501s didn't do MDI/MDI-X; the 5501 on FreeBSD had a driver
problem that locked up TX
- currently have a 5501 as our PABX with a USB drive and astlinux -
works great. USB support is there for larger disk drives and a mini-PCI slot
- O/S support is very stable (other than driver issues noted above) in
Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD
- Soekris VPN card is a good hardware accelerator for a VPN concentrator
- I have a couple of these as well unused at present
The 6501s and 7501s are vapour as far as I can tell.
I have half a dozen boxes sitting here - mix of 4501s and 4801s and some
more due to be phased out of service shortly. If anyone wants these, I
can swap for decent beer.
Regards,
Stu
