We have used the Soekris extensively on several networks and have found the support to be lacking and the product to have some quirks. One recent problem was that when the boxes get power cycled they do not come back up and needed to have someone manually cycle the power a couple of times. This was not isolated to one or two units.

Another issue we found was that some larger CF cards did not boot correctly, there is however a fix for this.

BUT saying that the ones that are operational after resolving the issues seem to be nice and stable. I think the last batch we purchased was of 20 units and of that quarter of them gave us problems but the rest have been stable. The batch prior to that had major issues as Soekris has installed the wrong capacitor in the board and had to be returned.

Regards

Andrew

From: nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces@list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Nicholas Lee
Sent: Thursday, 29 April 2010 10:07 a.m.
To: Andy Davidson
Cc: NZNOG@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: Re: [nznog] Small linux boxes

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Andy Davidson <andy@nosignal.org> wrote:

Hi,

This is interesting to me, because I have been looking to replace some of my hosted VM infrastructure with low power devices such as the ones discussed in this thread. They would make ideal static webservers, recursive dns servers for our offices, development and staging environments, and some of our internal apps.  The Soekris units have a reseller channel who bundle the boards with power supplies and a 1U case.

My motivation ?  Each VM costs me 20W of power.  One of the Soekris units runs in 10W.

If you want low power VMs, why not go Atom with Xen/PV or OpenVZ?  Either will be fine for static web and dns.

IO is likely to be a limiting factor for dev/staging environments.  Most Soekris/Alix units I've used in the past haven't really been decent for IO.

Nicholas