Henrik Lund Kramsh=F8j wrote: > I decided to put my 5501 into production at home and hooked > the console up to another server, so I can send the +++reset > to make it reset and find the disk when I need to reboot > (also connected it to an APC powerbar so I can powercycle as last > resort)
Great. So now to operate a 5501 (a tiny little machine that uses only 10W) reliably, you also need a full-size server that uses 100W, and a 1U rackmount box that can cycle the power to the 5501. This takes the space and power advantages of a Soekris and completely eliminates them. If you use your Soekris 5501 as the network router / wireless AP / firewall / server (as I do), it is actually worse, since then the power-cycling server and APC PDU become inaccessibly if the 5501 needs to be rebooted and doesn't come back up. This then implies that a reboot requires a physical trip to the wiring closet. Actually, a very sane (but slightly expensive) solution would be to install two redundant 5501 boxes, cross-linked as far as networking is concerned (they have enough Ethernet ports to spare), and use GPIO ports on each 5501 to control the power to the other one. This would cost a factor of two in bill-of-materials, and a few thousand $ in NRE charges for a power-control board. Nice. > I would REEEEEALLLLLLLY like a short message from Soekris.com saying > "We know this, and we are working on it" - but I dont remember seeing > this anywhere? Agree. It would be good to know that Soekris considers this to be a problem, and is intending to actually fix it (for example by having a combios update). At this point, this problem has been known since late June (see Martin Johnson's message on this list from 6/30); several people (including me) have reported here that they can reproduce it (all it takes is a 5501, a disk, and a reboot command). It is now late August, and to my knowledge there has been no single indication from Soekris that they even acknowledge this as a problem (or consider the current behavior acceptable), or that they have any intention of addressing it. The pessimist in me is thinking that this problem will never be fixed, and that I'm better off replacing my 5501 with some Via nanoUTX boards, perhaps returning the 5501 under warranty for a refund. The optimist in me hopes that a combios upgrade will be available any day now. The lazy bum in we will do nothing (replacing the 5501 would cause extra work), but will stop buying and recommending Soekris until they demonstrate that they care. -- Ralph Becker-Szendy [EMAIL PROTECTED] (408)395-1435 735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033 _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
