Richard Kettlewell

For several years, my house router was an old PC with several PCI ethernet cards, running Debian lenny. It took up space, consumed much more power than the job really demanded, and was very noisy. So I wanted to clone the system onto some more appropriate platform.

My first candidate was a second hand Soekris net4501. I got a long way into setting this up before deciding to abandon it (see below for the reasons why), and switched instead to a Fabiatech FX5624. I completed the job using this system and it’s now in service.

( Lots of detail, pictures, etc )

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).