On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 9:22 PM, Todd Pytel <[email protected]> wrote: > I've had an OpenBSD router built on basically commodity PC hardware > running for many years now, long enough that I'm starting to worry about > some part of it (especially the disk) dying abruptly at the worst > possible time. I'm planning on replacing it with a Soekris box. Since I > don't have as much time for my tech hobby as I used to, I haven't > followed much in the way of tech, networking, or OpenBSD news. So I'm > hoping the folks in know here can give my plan a quick check and let me > know if I'm missing any important developments or overlooking any basic > hardware requirements. > > What I have right now is a box built on a VIA board with a 533MHz Samuel > 2 processor and 256MB of RAM, vintage 2003 or so. Mostly it just does > routing and firewalling duties for my network, which includes some > servers on public IP space used for very low-traffic hobby stuff. It's > also an NTP server for my network. That's it. So I have basically no > unusual requirements apart from having at least 3 network interfaces, > which looks like it's already standard on the Soekris gear. > > So from Soekris's offerings, does the standard net5501-60 look like a > good choice? Along with that, I'll need the appropriate power supply and > a CF card. Maybe an extra null modem cable since I can never find mine. > Anything else I'm missing? Then to get things installed I'll use a > serial console, do a PXE boot to get the installer running, and then go > from there? Any other unusual OpenBSD compatibility issues to worry > about? I know there are plenty of OBSD/Soekris project pages out there, > but it's not always clear whether anything important has changed in the > years since they were published. > > Thanks for any pointers you can provide. > > --Todd
I'm currently running OpenBSD on a net5501-70 and it's been great. I was using a CF card but have moved to 2.5" SATA as I like having the freedom of space and the CF card corrupted itself causing it to stop booting. As for installing using PXE boot will work but you do need to make sure you tell it to use the com port when it boots the installer, see the wiki page for more details. http://wiki.soekris.info/Installing_OpenBSD _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
