Soekris engineering "routers"

[David Kelly]

On Oct 30, 2004, at 7:45 PM, LiQuiD wrote:

> I've noticed a few people mention this company, http://www.soekris.com
> in the list now.  Their website claims they can be used with a compact
> flash card.  I'm curious regarding their usage with a flash card as a
> hard drive.  Has anyone successfully been able to install FreeBSD on 
> one
> of those boxes using a compact flash card?

You should download the Soekris email lists' archives and do a bit of 
research. Yes, FreeBSD can and does run well off a CF card. There are 
plenty of tricks one can perform using the FreeBSD source to optimize 
for that target such as linking (most) all executables to shared 
libraries rather than static. Might as well put / and /usr on the same 
filesystem (necessary for the shared library thing to work right all 
the time). Add "noatime" to your mount flags. And hack up most of the 
/etc/rc scripts so as to minimize writing to your limited-life CF 
media.

Might be a good idea to make /var and /tmp as md filesystems.

IIRC one set of scripts and utilities for creating a minimal FreeBSD 
for Soekris is called "MiniBSD."

Also look into picoBSD. IIRC this is where one puts most all needed 
files and binaries into one file image. Is how FreeBSD creates bootable 
install floppies. Make one with nothing but your router image and you 
might chose to boot the Soekris diskless off another FreeBSD machine.

Its been almost 2 years since I last did these sorts of tricks. Started 
with MiniBSD and expanded. For a former employer so I don't have it to 
share.

The Soekris products are solid and very good values. I think we had a 
few CPU's get too hot. Also I don't like to hear the oils on my finger 
sizzle when I touch a chip. So we glued big aluminum heatsinks to the 
CPU with special heatsink epoxy. Those heatsinks barely got warm in an 
unvented box. Our heatsinks blocked use of the PCMCIA slot, which we 
didn't use. Caution with the PCI slot, its 3.3 volt only. Hard to find 
a sound card which works at 3.3.

We bought one big heatsink surplus. Then cut about 1.75" squares out of 
it with a bandsaw for use on the Soekris.

--
David Kelly N4HHE, dkelly at HiWAAY.net
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.