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On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 07:45:15PM -0700, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
>> Yep. I've got two of those in production as firewalls. They are at least
>> twice as expensive as the pcengines units. Also, anything but the new-ish
>> soekris 55xx series is an order of magnitude slower than the alix boards.
>
> The Soekris boxes have much better BIOSes (better supported by / supporting
> at least the FreeBSD boot loader).
Well, that's until we've got coreboot running on the alix.2 and alix.3
series, which should not take too long. It already works on alix.1c.
> They also have other neat things like a
> PCI slot,
Alix.1c has a full length pci slot + a minipci slot. The various other alix
boards have at least one minipci slot.
> a better RS-232 port,
Uhm - better how? 9 pins exposed to an external serial connector, 115200bps -
does it get better than that?
> GPIO ports etc etc.
All alix boards have a (large) GPIO header.
> The advantages of the PC Engines boards are 1) cost and 2) awesomely small
> case.
I'd argue that the PC Engines boards have all the advantages you listed above
as well, short of the BIOS perhaps for now.
> Both the Soekris and the PC Engines boards are super fun though. I usually
> use them as small routers or firewalls with FreeBSD ("self-built" with
> NanoBSD or via pfSense or m0n0wall). The new generation (Alix and 5501)
> don't seem to have any trouble keeping a 100Mbit link busy.
I see the same; I can basically forward/firewall traffic pretty much at wire
speed on the alix2c3. And that's with Voyage Linux (http://linux.voyage.hk/)
which is a Debian Etch-based distro for boards like the alix and soekris
ones.
Thanks,
Ward.
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