Hi all- I searched the mailing list and didn't find much so I'm posting what I plan to buy to build up a 6501 to replace a 5501 that has done great service for several years. Here goes:
I need 6 network interfaces, only 2 of them need to be gigabit. I'd like to run a full Redhat / Fedora / CentOS based distro No major storage needed -- it will be primarily firewall, router, and VPN. Two internet connections and 4 internal networks. Here's what I was thinking: net6501-70 in the 19" rackmount case SKU 10650174 Startech ST1000SPEXDP Dual port Gigabit PCI Express card http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833114035 The extra enet card uses Realtek 8111C chips and will be internet connections < 50 Mbps so no worries on load there. Only 2 interfaces out of the 6 will see any significant traffic beyond 100 Mbps. I have no idea if this card meets the "low power" requirements to be using the the 6501. If it doesn't can anyone recommend a dual port enet card PCI express that will work -- can be a slow as 100 Mbps per port. For storage I was thinking of just getting two of the Transcend 32GB MLC mSATA SSD mini-pci express cards Soekris sells. Set it up with software RAID-1. Am I crazy to do this? Log data and DHCP lease storage will be the most common reason for writes -- logs can do plenty of writes if firewall rules trigger logs / SSH failed attempts things like that. With recent filesystems being careful not to update inodes when atime changes, the flash shouldn't see too much activity beyond log writes. Would I be better off with two 2.5" hard drives instead? I'm totally fine with hard drives instead of the flash drives. If I were to use hard drives -- anyone have anything they recommend? I read on the Soekris wiki that some 2.5" drives are not made for continuous use but rather for laptops that are spun up and down often. That should be it. Hopefully any answers will help others trying to choose storage and expansion enet interfaces for the 6501. Oh -- in case you are wondering, the 5501 has a CF card with Fedora 8 install where I change the mount options for noatime and set it up so the /var/log structure is replicated in a ramdisk at boot time. It's resulted in very few writes to the CF card over years of uptime (easy to tell by watching IRQ counts in /proc/interrupts for the IDE). This has worked well, but I would rather have a "full up" distro install with RAID-1 for whatever the storage is. It's not serving files in any way -- primarily a router / firewall but I don't want a single disk failure (whether SSD or 2.5" drive) to make the box not function -- a reboot is acceptable if a drive fails and it comes back up on one drive with the other kicked out. Thanks -Eric Malkowski _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list [email protected] http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
