I like the idea of recycling these old devices, but they have a few 
problems:

1) ugly as sin
2) noisy as hell
3) guzzle power like the devil
4) are old and have too many points of failure for my liking

Essentially you end up with the processing power of a wrap/soekris, with 
better expandability, but using usually 100-200w of power against 5-10w and 
making a lot of noise, taking up space looking like you are running an 
internet cafe in Somalia rather than having an intelligent, secure home 
network.

A quick calculation, at UK electricity prices, a 100-200w device on 24/7 
works out at more than the $200 for a complete wrap with at least the same 
processing power on paper.

having said that, the soekris and wrap are clearly underpowered, with less 
than 20mb throughput (soekris) on ethernet ports, UK DSL downspeed is now 
faster than the soekris can deal with, and slower than the supposedly "slow" 
wireless cards since 3-4 years ago, and can now only work properly on a 
build of FreeBSD that is as old as the board design.

We need to move onto 1ghz + machines, still passively, but intelligently 
cooled (even top of range Soekris has no CPU heatsink and the box has not 
even given the first thought to cooling/airflow). I suspect, looking at the 
price/performance advance of the IT/telecoms space in general (for example, 
the 128mb of memory on board these devices has fallen 10+ fold since I have 
been buying these devices but the boards still cost the same, of may have 
even gone up) I suspect that there are quite nice margins on these small 
embedded devices, which have not dropped in price nor improved performance 
in line with the market or even the software running on them.

Christian

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brandon" <bstone108 at comcast dot net>
To: <m0n0wall at lists dot m0n0 dot ch>
Sent: Saturday, June 03, 2006 12:11 AM
Subject: Re: [m0n0wall] Cheap Hardware


> personaly,  I find the cheepest hardware to use is old pII machines 
> salvaged from the local mill,   they throw out perfectly good pcs every 
> year in what they call "preventitive mainenance.  go to salvage yard, 
> pay 1$ each for them,  they usualy got a 3com card in them and 128 of ram 
> and 2-4 gig hard drive.  get a dozen of them and a box of extra cards that 
> they also threw out for 1$ for whole box.
>
> meaning each machine has at most 2 dollars put into it.
>
> 2 bucks for dedicated firewall?  not bad
>
> Bao C. Ha wrote:
>
>>The KBFlash-1 Rev 4 Flashrom sounds like a DOC. Just boot up
>>FreeBSD 4.11 to see if it recognizes it. If it does, it is
>>just a piece of cake to load m0n0wall on it.
>>
>>This machine was known to OEM as the Bcom WinNET II 5BLIP.
>>
>>Bao
>>
>>On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 11:32:54AM -0500, Junior Gillespie wrote:
>>
>>>On 6/2/06, Bao C. Ha <bao at hacom dot net> wrote:
>>>
>>>>A couple of weeks ago, I sold a m0n0wall ready machine on eBay
>>>>for about $20.
>>>>
>>>>http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=9723142370
>>>>
>>>This particular item is the Bocavision JNC205.
>>>I've personally used these machines for m0nwall and various other
>>>applications. They function fairly well. Some may recognize this hardware 
>>>as
>>>the Wave Wireless SpeedLAN 8300 and 8400 using the Karlnet TurboCell
>>>protocol for wireless networking. The SpeedLAN product utilizes a 
>>>KBFlash-1
>>>Rev 4 Flashrom unit that is mounted by a EEPROM chip on the board.
>>>
>>>Something I've been interested in doing for quite sometime is overwriting
>>>the OS on the Flashrom with m0n0wall instead of using a CF or HDD. If 
>>>anyone
>>>wants to give it a try or has some advice or recommendations for 
>>>performing
>>>this task, it would be much appreciated.
>>>
>>>Thanks,
>>>Junior
>>>
>>
>>
>
>
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