[Lvlug] soekris still the best choice?

[Pat Regan]

Scott Piccotti wrote:
> What you're giving up is mostly storage space and horsepower. And, of  
> course, extra hardware if you shell out the bucks for a bigger box.  
> It depends on exactly what you want to do. I had looked at Soekris  
> hardware a while back, but never got the time/money to play with one.  

I am a little biased...  I have a WRT54G here at home, and I have 3
others that I set up for friends and family.

I am quite happy with them all.  On the first one I set up the wireless
would disappear once in a while requiring a power cycle.  After
switching to an aftermarket firmware this has not been an issue at all.

They are very impressive little boxes.  The old ones have 125mhz MIPS
CPUs and 16 meg of ram, the newer ones have 200mhz MIPS and 32 meg of
ram I believe.  The old ones (not v 3.0) have hardware real hardware
VLAN support on the switch (I believe this is how they set up the DMZ).
 I have not yet found a use for a 4 port switch with VLANs at home :).

My WRT54G at home replaced a 3com rack mount 10 Mb switch (with 2 100 Mb
uplink ports!), an 802.11b access point, and a Pentium 120.  The Linksys
box does almost everything those pieces of hardware were doing but isn't
much bigger than the old access point.  I am very happy with the
reduction in noise, power, and space.

> I have used a couple of WRT54G boxes and between OpenWRT and Freifunk
> there's plenty of options. But you'll never have enough space or
> power for a full LAMP stack.
>

I don't believe your firewall/gateway box is a very good place to be
running a web server.  I used to run all kinds of things on my old
Pentium 120 gateway machine, but I didn't really think it was a good
idea at the time.  I was just lazy, and the machine was there :).

The less software running open to the internet on your router, the better.

Pat
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