the new gateway, it lives!
Geek
Well, technically it is a new router because it doesn't connect different media (hi Tim!). But does that mean wireless base-stations are actually gateways? Hmm...
Anyway, after my old one tried to kill me and now that my exams are over, I decided that it is time to replace challenger with the long-vaunted net4801 from Soekris Engineering that I gave myself for christmas. People, your bits are now being routed by mikado.
Originally the plan was to do a PXE netboot from pacific, but that means having both TFTP and NFS running which is something I'd like to avoid. Also, mikado wouldn't be able to boot if pacific was down, which is pretty poor for something as critical as the core router for a network. Happily, the net4801 has an internal Type 1&2 Compact Flash slot. I picked up a 128Mb card and put a near-full install of FreeBSD 4.10 on it. The only thing missing are some extras like man pages, games and the like. It is using around 90Mb at the moment.
None of the FreeBSD workarounds and patches mentioned on the Soekris site have been needed (so far?), hopefully they have all been merged into the tree. I used miniBSD and the jail(8) man page as a rough guide for putting together the installation, using stock 4.10 pre-built locally from source. The process went something like:
cd /usr/src; make installword DESTDIR=...cd make kernel KERNCONF=... DESTDIR=...cd etc; make distribution DESTDIR=...- Remove undeeded docs, games, etc.
- Configure the installation (serial console, /etc knobs, /dev, etc)
- Make a locally mounted diskimage using vnconfig
- Copy the installation to the disk image
- Copy the disk image to the flash card.
I'll do a proper writeup one day, once I have polished the process and installation enough. Overall, I'm 100% happy with the net4801. It works exactly as advertised, it is compact, noiseless, super efficient, is extremely expandable and it works well with useful operating systems like FreeBSD. Need a generic network appliance? Get one! Can't be bothered setting it up yourself? Get me to do it for you. ;)
Note to self: fix the clock, use NTP.
Comments
I think I asked in a previous post, but who knows where that's gone. How much was the net4801 and where and how did you get it?
Posted by: Paul Hoadley on July 9, 2004 10:10 AM
Total spend so far is less than $500:
USD$265 for a 266Mhz/128Mb net4801 with case. USD$49 for delivery in just outside a week. Customs was AUD$62 and the 128Mb CF card was ~$45.
I'll end up buying a 5-way card reader (handy for other stuff as well) and might get a second CF card (to make upgrading easier/faster). I'll also need to buy a power adapter for it if I want to run my old ethernet hub at the same time.
This is more than I wanted to spend in the end, but I didn't take customs and the CF card into account.
Posted by: Mike on July 10, 2004 07:24 PM
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