Cameron Kerr wrote:

These have been quite popular for creating routers and access points:

Soekris Engineering http://www.soekris.com/

*cough* APE Route Servers *cough*

You can actually get Alix units from nicegear in Christchurch. There is also routerboard system from mikrotek and router station pro from Ubiquiti. Although the RSP seems to use a switch chipset for the "LAN" ports. Nicholas On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 4:35 PM, Don Stokes wrote:

On 22/03/10 16:06, Cameron Kerr wrote:

...

Soekris Engineering http://www.soekris.com/

Better bang for buck:

http://www.pcengines.ch/ especially http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d3.htm

Order the ALIX.2d13 for 3x ethernet and all the internal options (RTC battery, COM2 serial header, internal USB headers) installed. US$113 + US$9.50 for the case, vs US$173 for the Soekris net4501, which is a *lot* less grunty (133 MHz, 64MB vs 500 MHz, 256 MB) and has no USB.

Both the Soekris and Alix boards have onboard serial ports other than their console ports, although the Alix only brings out the data lines, no modem control. The Soekris internal header is a standard header for connecting a ribbon 9-pin hole.

Standard cases for both outfits don't have external serial holes.

The Alix has 2d series have dual USB sockets which can be used with serial adapters; the Soekris only has a single USB hole (and the 4501, not even that).

Deliveries aren't quite as quick for the PC-Engines (they trombone via Switzerland from Taiwan) as for Soekris, although Soekris have had delivery/supply issues in the past. Pascal Dornier at PC-Engines is pretty good about keeping you informed and not billing you until the product actually leaves Switzerland.

-- don _______________________________________________ NZNOG mailing list NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/nznog

On 29/04/10 03:11, Andy Davidson wrote:

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.

I have so far held off because the Soekris net6501 [0] promises to be a much more capacious device, but so far pricing and availability has been illusive. If anyone has any more info on this upcoming unit or some other Intel based low power 1U boxes.

I've rack-mounted standard-case Soekris boxen by bolting them to rack blanking plates with holes for the LEDs to shine through. The net5501 can take internal hard drives in its standard case. The standard Alix cases are too small for that, although you may be able to get third party cases with a drive bay and internal PSU. Of course if you use network storage (or even flash) that won't be a problem. Alix boards also pull less power; even the lowly net4501 turns up its toes given a 500 mA PSU, whereas the Alix goes just fine with one (measured draw, ~ 400 mA under load), not that I'd do that in the field. Larger Soekris models are even thirstier. I'm guessing from past behaviour, the Soekris net6501 is going to be a bit pricier and pull a bit more power than you'd like. It'll also be late; www.soekris.com says "production availability in Q1 '10", it's Q2 already and there aren't even prototype photos yet. This doesn't surprise me; Soekris has a history of over-optimistic release schedules. For this application, it may be worth having a look at some of the nettop boxes; a quick perusal suggests that the Atom based ones are still a bit thirsty on power (which also leads me to think the net6501 might not achieve what you want), but there are other breeds which might be suitable. -- don

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Andy Davidson wrote:

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.

A few big firms are looking "physicalization" (yeah, that's the buzzword). Which is really designed to squeeze lots of medium-spec'd servers into a rack. Look at something like the Dell XS11-VX8 (fortuna) [1] which uses has 6 servers per RU. Intel was also talking about a standard [2] However the pages I have seen for this have goals of 20-30W per machine which probably isn't what you want. I'm not sure if some of the CPUs in this area are have the VM instructions either. This may be more what you are after: http://www.linux-arm.org/Main/LinuxArmOrg However if you are only deploying a few units it might not be worth it. I make it at $2/month/server for a 10W saving. [1] http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/2009/05/19/del... [2] http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10386452-264.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea... -- Simon Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/ "To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.

On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 11:14, Simon Lyall wrote:

However if you are only deploying a few units it might not be worth it. I make it at $2/month/server for a 10W saving.

Don't forget the "environmentally sensitive" AKA "green" multiplier.

Simon Lyall  |  Very Busy  |  Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/

Hamish. -- http://tr.im/HKM

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(a)list.waikato.ac.nz [mailto:nznog-bounces(a)list.waikato.ac.nz] On Behalf Of Nicholas Lee Sent: Thursday, 29 April 2010 10:07 a.m. To: Andy Davidson Cc: NZNOG(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Small linux boxes On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 3:11 AM, Andy Davidson 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

Ian Batterbee wrote:

Thanks for the (numerous) replies. There seem to be a few common sources that have been suggested. I will work through them and may post a summary if people are interested ?

Seb waves hand showing interest in the summary...

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Ian Batterbee mailto:ibatterb(a)gmail.com> wrote:

If anyone has any information on equipment as above that they're using, or have played with, please contact me off-list.

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