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