Comment by blueking | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blueking | Hacker News Reader

These are the best SBC routers on the market. It used to be between Soekris and pcengines, but Soekris dropped the ball.

and the enclosures are also very nice too

http://pcengines.ch/apu.htm http://pcengines.ch/case1d2u.htm

It uses coreboot, which you can recompile from source to be reasonably sure no BIOS backdoors, and it also has a hard firmware flash write jumper (thanks to me)... to make sure your recompiled BIOS doesn't get overwritten remotely when a vulnerability is found in your OS (easy with coreboot if you leave the .config in the firmware image which is the default). I suggest you run the latest OpenBSD, and add the NEUG USB RNG. This is a dream machine. 64bit 1ghz dual core... up to 4 gigs of ram,low power, great great design, two PCIe card slots, gig eth. The best. And I have tried everything.

Building your own PC tower as a firewall, well been there. Its not the way. Fun project sure, but wasteful and inefficient.

There are a few really good cheap routers that can run OpenWRT amazingly fast ie.

http://www.amazon.com/TP-LINK-TL-WR841N-Wireless-Router-300M...

If you

1. add the packet shaping module and fill in your modems speed

2. replace the routers /etc/hosts file to block all internet advertising inc youtube ads with this ;

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

and 3. change the DNS to googles 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Then you have the ultimate home router setup. But if you want secure / vpn / tor bridge etc then you need to go to the above mentioned with OpenBSD and be careful to buy a compatible wifi PCIe card.

Why do you say Soekris dropped the ball? I've been running Gentoo on a net5501 for years now (since 2009) and never had any problems except with the USB (which I'm using to read out my SMA inverter).

Are their newer designs flawed in some way?

They promised new designs that just never appeared, or came too late to be competitive. I remember being very happy with my 4801 units. I could run OpenBSD with OpenVPN and asterisk. Neato back then. I had a crypto phone system in 2007 complete with IAXYs (remember those ?)

But running Atom on a router is a big turn off and Coreboot is a major win for PCengines in the new climate.

The PCengines design is a lot slicker. Its lightweight and appropriate for the demographic. IMO the current Soekris product line shows that they don't really have strong concept of who their customer is. My impression is oversized, underpowered with too many ethernet ports and a 10 year old case design. Not on my desk. And if we are talking about the server room, well for that kind of money I will buy a Sun coolthreads server and drop OpenBSD on that. A t1000 goes for what $80 now ? Atom is just so bland. Its mcdonalds.

This is a good example of the marketplace being so huge and varied that one guys requirements make no sense to someone else.

My Soekris box is my home PBX asterisk server, and its killer feature is being "directly" connected to a 12 volt deep cycle battery directly, it can run the entire system (cable modem, the soekris box (also acting as firewall) and a couple of the phones and LAN switches. The battery capacity is around 100 aH and it could run the phones for at least two days although I've never had to run more than 24 hours. One of those, if I'm going to work at home, its going to be reliable things.

The electrical wiring is exactly what ham radio guys would use, it is exactly what I do use for my own ham radio gear, including power pole distribution/fuse panels and automatic chargers although instead of powering a 2M rig its running my networking gear.

Some of the networking gear is powered by DC-DC converters, "around 12 in" and 5 volts out.

The aesthetics of the case was not a major design decision. I almost used those "useless" extra ethernet ports to plug my phones in directly, eliminating the need for powering an ethernet hub, but I have too many phones.

I don't really use my landline much anymore, which begins to make the whole topic irrelevant.

If you're speaking to the original Atom, yes, it was bland.

If you're speaking about the C2000 SoC (Avoton or Rangely), then you're dead nuts wrong. These things are 2-8 cores (6-20W) of 2008-era Xeon fun. EPT runs, AES-NI runs, etc.

The PC Engines APU (we sell a TON) is significantly underpowered compared to the C2K series SoCs.

Soekris does not have C2000 series models available yet. Their top-of-the-line router seems to be currently a E6xx based board, ie using 4 year old Atoms.

Soekris is not the only game in town.

The main problem I have with the PCEngines APU is that it has Realtek 8111/8169 NICs, while the Soekris net6501 has e1000 Intels... Realtek NICs tend, from my experience, to behave erratically under high load on Linux, and sometimes simply not work on FreeBSD and OpenBSD

The full-sized PCIe slot is also a nice touch.

(disclaimer: possible bias, am running a OpenBSD/net6501 as an edge router for a hackerspace)

Meh, Soekris was so 2006. Their designs are IMO a bit tacky. And since they use Atom and intel network chipsets, the question needs to be asked... do we trust intel hardware anymore ? I agree intel nics are a bit more reliable.

There is no reason to trust Intel less than any other silicon provider.

I don't agree. The biggest American semiconductor company. Backdoor guaranteed.

So you don't run ANY intel products? That's quite an accomplishment.

That doesn't follow.

Which is why you trust AMD, a company that's headquartered a whopping 600 second drive away from Intel [0]. How is Intel's stuff backdoored, but AMD's stuff not?

[0] http://goo.gl/maps/EB1LA

I never said AMD silicon wasn't backdoored. Its a solid bet that it is. I don't trust either, but having a intel chipset and processor together on a edge router sounds like a bad idea to me.

I tracked down the r8169 problem to a problem when multiple descriptors are fetched in one IRQ. Kernel 3.12 includes a fix that only fetches one at a time. Have you tried a kernel with that fix in it?

Not yet - I'm really more interested in getting FreeBSD working with it :).

What would be the total hardware cost for a single PC engines router?

About $150 I think from the shop page:

apu1c - $136

case1d2u - $8.7

ac18vus - $4.5

1 APU.1D4 system board 4GB USD155.00 USD155.00 8471.5000 TW 235g 1 Enclosure 3 LAN, alu, USB USD8.70 USD8.70 8473.3000 CN 241g 1 SSD M-Sata 16GB MLC Phison USD22.00 USD22.00 8523.5100 TW 10g 1 Compex WLE200NX miniPCI express card USD18.70 USD18.70 8517.7000 CN 10g Shipping + handling USD42.40 Total USD246.80 496g

Assuming 4GB RAM, SSD, Wifi N, enclosure... oops add $5 for the AC adapter.

Thanks, I confused the "availability > 500" value with "minimum order size", as the USD 8.70 price for case seemed very low.

The only problem with Soekris is that they are expensive, but from what I can see they're still there and also announcing new products.

we sell the APU, but it's not "the best".

There is no AES-NI, so no VPN acceleration. The Realtek Ethernet devices are slow. You can't actually pass 1Gbps across them.

There are no PCIe slots. There are miniPCIe slots (3, one can be m-SATA).

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