Jim,

Things to consider:

Hardware reliability
Media reliability
Power consumption
Hackability
Space requirements

As for the hardware, CD-ROM drives and floppy drives can fail.  Hard drives
will drop dead as well.  Anything that physically moves will stop doing so
one day.  The magnetic media of a floppy disk has never been very reliable,
and it isn't easy to hack the ISO image should you ever want to.

Soekris boxes (and similar) offer stellar reliability mostly due to their
utter lack of moving parts, plus this naturally reduces power consumption as
well.

I'm poor but have lots of old PC's around, so I use the generic PC version
on a PIII 500 with a $15 Compact Flash drive.  I don't get to revel in the
low electricity bills of my fellow Soekris users, but my unit is very
reliable with the only moving parts being a couple of fans, which won't stop
my m0n0wall cold should one fail.

Hope this helps a bit.

Eric (top poster) Garnice


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jim Wells" <jwells at networksisp dot com>
To: <m0n0wall at lists dot m0n0 dot ch>
Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 11:01 PM
Subject: [m0n0wall] CDROM ISO


>
> First my appreciation of Manuel's efforts bringing this project to all of
> us. We have been using the m0n0wall for just a few months and we have been
> fascinated with the ability to connect vpn tunnels to the cisco pix and
> linksys vpn endpoint firewalls. Truly a great product.
>
> I wanted to know if there is any reason not to run the m0n0wall from the
> cdrom with the floppy on a standard pc with 2 nic's opposed to using the
> image version to a hard drive or the flash version. I know the flash
version
> is small but we can pickup old Pentium II or III computers for almost
> nothing plus an extra network adapter for less than the cost of the
hardware
> for the soekris. I just wanted to get some pro's and con's from some of
the
> users on the list.
>
> Thanks
>
> Jim Wells
>
>
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