On 22 May 2010, at 22:41, Grant wrote:
Does anyone know of a basic device that would function well as a Gentoo router/firewall? Using typical hardware seems like overkill. I should be able to offload package compilation duties to another local machine on the network. It would also be nice if it were small, cheap, and power-efficient.
I believe stuff like this <http://www.routerboard.com/pricelist.php?started_from_home=1 > is really common on the Athens network, but it all appears to be MIPS. I would imagine that, rather than run Gentoo MIPS, one would use something like Openembedded, although searching for the name of that I was reminded of Gentoo Embedded, which might be ideal.
One used to be able to get 486 / 586 boards of similar form-factor, but I have no idea if you still can. Cross-compiling using distcc is probably a PITA, and I believe x86 is less power-efficient than MIPS or ARM, but I don't know by how much. An Atom based board might be the best compromise if you want to use "real Gentoo" - the problem with anything else is that you have to learn to use / build a specialist router-distro if you want to do anything extra-ordinary with it.
Stroller.
