Soekris so far

[ewx]

Steve gave me a Soekris net4501. I've been gradually getting this into shape for use as the house router. This page covers the details in case anyone else attempts something similar; some aspects were not entirely trivial.

Testing reveals that it can route data at (at least) 24Mbit/second, which is comfortably faster than the nominal speed of our Internet connection. It's much slower than the nominal speed of the house wireless but actually marginally faster than the measured speed, so I'm not worried about that either.

(“At least” 24Mbit/s because that could be a limit somewhere other than the Soekris.)

Usefully for the testing it turns out that crossover cables are no longer necessary, at least when connecting the Soekris to a modern Mac (and for all I know any other modern hardware).

Comments

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Auto-crossover detection is an optional part of the gigabit spec, but in practice it tends to be implemented.

[simont]

Hey, you got GRUB to work! Cool. I'll have to try that again the next time I reinstall my own router. (Which probably ought to be soon, actually; it's not running lenny yet.)

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yes, everyone told me Grub didn't work so I tried it anyway and (modulo the detail at the end of the “Boot Loader” section, which only came to light much later) it worked fine.

[simont]

I suppose it's possible that GRUB itself has been improved in the interim; you were using the Lenny version, right? I've only tried pre-Lenny ones.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yes, I assume that some bug was fixed since the belief that Grub doesn't work got established.

[dotwaffle.livejournal.com]

It is not an optional part - it's part of the 802.3ab standard that 1000BASE-T implements. Included within 1000BASE-T (on copper at least) is negotiated speed, duplex, MDIX and clocking.

It is possible to turn it off, and indeed for fibre connections it quite often is turned off, but provided you're using Cat5e (copper) cable or higher, you're advised to leave it turned on.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

RW filesystems are after all what they are mostly sold for! Do you have good (i.e. quantitative) reason to think they're less reliable than spinning disks?

In practice it's unlikely to swap except when doing an upgrade; writes will mostly be logging. If that does turn out to be enough to wear out the flash even in the presence of wear leveling, then I'll buy another card and perhaps log over the network instead.