[abollaert]

Why do you say Soekris dropped the ball? I've been running Gentoo on a net5501 for years now (since 2009) and never had any problems except with the USB (which I'm using to read out my SMA inverter).

Are their newer designs flawed in some way?

[blueking]

They promised new designs that just never appeared, or came too late to be competitive. I remember being very happy with my 4801 units. I could run OpenBSD with OpenVPN and asterisk. Neato back then. I had a crypto phone system in 2007 complete with IAXYs (remember those ?)

But running Atom on a router is a big turn off and Coreboot is a major win for PCengines in the new climate.

The PCengines design is a lot slicker. Its lightweight and appropriate for the demographic. IMO the current Soekris product line shows that they don't really have strong concept of who their customer is. My impression is oversized, underpowered with too many ethernet ports and a 10 year old case design. Not on my desk. And if we are talking about the server room, well for that kind of money I will buy a Sun coolthreads server and drop OpenBSD on that. A t1000 goes for what $80 now ? Atom is just so bland. Its mcdonalds.

[VLM]

This is a good example of the marketplace being so huge and varied that one guys requirements make no sense to someone else.

My Soekris box is my home PBX asterisk server, and its killer feature is being "directly" connected to a 12 volt deep cycle battery directly, it can run the entire system (cable modem, the soekris box (also acting as firewall) and a couple of the phones and LAN switches. The battery capacity is around 100 aH and it could run the phones for at least two days although I've never had to run more than 24 hours. One of those, if I'm going to work at home, its going to be reliable things.

The electrical wiring is exactly what ham radio guys would use, it is exactly what I do use for my own ham radio gear, including power pole distribution/fuse panels and automatic chargers although instead of powering a 2M rig its running my networking gear.

Some of the networking gear is powered by DC-DC converters, "around 12 in" and 5 volts out.

The aesthetics of the case was not a major design decision. I almost used those "useless" extra ethernet ports to plug my phones in directly, eliminating the need for powering an ethernet hub, but I have too many phones.

I don't really use my landline much anymore, which begins to make the whole topic irrelevant.

[gonzo]

If you're speaking to the original Atom, yes, it was bland.

If you're speaking about the C2000 SoC (Avoton or Rangely), then you're dead nuts wrong. These things are 2-8 cores (6-20W) of 2008-era Xeon fun. EPT runs, AES-NI runs, etc.

The PC Engines APU (we sell a TON) is significantly underpowered compared to the C2K series SoCs.

[zokier]

Soekris does not have C2000 series models available yet. Their top-of-the-line router seems to be currently a E6xx based board, ie using 4 year old Atoms.

[gonzo]

Soekris is not the only game in town.