Does anyone have any experience with these under openbsd: http://www.storever.com/product/openbrick/openbrick-ng
Basically, I am looking for something small, cheap and reliable (preferrably no fan, and possibility of running without HD) that is capable of routing 100Mb/s
Any other recommendations?
I have one of those Advantech FWA-660s running 3.6 stored on a CF. It's an i815e board with 633 MHz Celeron and 256 MB RAM. The standard package comes only with the board and the enclosure. It can also fit in a Tualatin 1.13 GHz processor inside (it is a supported configuration). The CPU itself is fanless but there's 2 40 mm fans blowing heat out on the casing itself. They are however barely audible.
It has 4 fxp and it will route 100 Mb/s. Good for a typical office setup, you can use the extra fxp for pfsync failover. One PCI (no mini PCI) slot but I figure it is useless since there isn't enough place to fit in a card. It does everything I want fairly well. Just one caveat though, it doesn't support PXE since the boot code is too large to fit inside the ROM.
It's quite heavy for a small box because of the all-steel material and it's definitely more expensive than net4801. I'm not sure about the price in other places but in Malaysia, it costs around RM 1,900 (USD 500 more or less).
I have 3 of them running at various sites for about a year and a half and so far no problem. Here's one of the boards dmesg that I happen to have at the moment, http://ihsan.synthexp.net/fwa660-dmesg.txt
Advantech also has a P4 model better suited for rack-based enclosure. It has either 4 GigE (em) or 4 Ethernet (fxp) physical ports. There's even an upcoming model with 8 ports (GigE or Ethernet).
-- Thank you for your time, Ihsan Junaidi Ibrahim, http://ihsan.synthexp.net
