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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

Does Soekris have any competition in this space? Any time I check I can never find any viable competitors. Soekris seems to have hit the "IDA Pro sweet spot," AKA unbelievable product priced just low enough to scare away any new competitors.

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Actually, soekris were pretty good but they are kinda outdated. I just got an apu1d4 from pcengines[0] and OpenBSD works like a charm on it. Half the price, much more power.

[0] http://www.pcengines.ch/apu1d4.htm

You need to look a bit closer to see the difference. APU uses cheaper realtek NIC and soekris uses Intel's. Soekris gives Intel QuickAssist to help encryption (VPN etc.). And soekris is showing up a new model later this year: http://soekris.com/products/net6801.html

But PC-engines boards are nice for their price. I'm considering to get one at home. That or spend a bit more on soekris box/

damn. you people are like audiophiles for network. ...is there a name for that already?

those two boards have more CPU power than my home theater PC... which crunches 720p video all day long without a decent GPU.

This is nothing like the absurdities of the audiophile community. Routing traffic just isn't as trivial as you think it is, and going with cheap NICs that are missing important features and have lower-quality drivers will produce measurable and significant differences in objective benchmarks. If you have something like a 100Mbps cable connection, you can't use just any off-the-shelf hardware and expect to solve any problems in software.

Thats what an audiophile would say

;)

I'm going to re-quote the parent for you.

> Routing traffic just isn't as trivial as you think it is

---Alex

It's also what the IETF says. Don't belittle those who are trying to fix the problems you're frustrated with but can't be bothered to understand.

The NIC used is also important if you need the router to do PPPoE. Most Intel ones will support jumbo frames which can let you still get 1500 byte packets to the ISP.

The lower-end PFSense rebranded hardware [1] seems pretty competitive to me, with the $300 box they're expecting to release at the end of June looking especially nice in comparison to the soekris boards. Alternatively, if you're willing to spend a few dollars on RAM, there are a number of barebones systems out there with Atom C2[3,5,7]58 processors that will give ten times the performance, so you could do some file serving with the box too.

[1] http://store.pfsense.org/hardware/

HP MicroServer with a second ethernet card. There are usually cashback deals on them and mine came with a HD. They have ECC ram too.

Dell T20 Xeon with a Type-1 hypervisor to run the router VM, using VT-d to isolate a multi-port NIC to the router VM. The same box can run other VMs with FreeNAS, Linux, Windows, etc.

I guess I should have been explicit and stated I was looking for a comparable system that competes with the soekris. Does the dell t20 really count as competition to a soekris? A quad port intel NIC and a Dell T20 w/ Xeon is at least twice as much as this soekris. And then there is the whole issue of size:

             Dell  Soekris
  Width      6.89    11.40
  Height    14.17     1.41
  Length    17.15     6.11
  Volume  1675.31    98.21

It depends on whether one also needs a NAS with RAID disks, or a Windows desktop, or a media server, or a personal cloud. If you need any of those, then there is nearly zero marginal size or cost to add a router VM, with more hardware headroom and OS flexibility than a special-purpose router.

Lanner has some interesting Atom-based options. I'm testing the FW-7525A right now, which has physical hardware bypass on one pair of ports.

Where can you buy Lanner products? I emailed them in the past regarding 7525, and they refused to sell me just one unit.

Mine is through Pyramid (www.pyramid.de) who resell some Lanner stuff. Don't know if they'll sell outside Europe, and can't guarantee they're interested in selling single units to new customers. (We've had some previous business with them).

Some supermicro mini-ITX boards (some work straight from 12 V)

some other mini-ITX boards by random manufacturers in that space

PC Engines, Netgate.

I think the Netgate C2758 looks suspiciously like a rebranded SuperMicro 5018A-FTN4 (of which I own two)...

You're right, I don't see the point of Netgate C2758.

However, this is a different design: http://store.netgate.com/ADI/RCC-VE-4860.aspx

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