This morning I shut off the Soekris Engineering net4801 that has served as our home firewall / PPP termination box for just over 18½ years.
In truth this has been long overdue. Like, at least 10 years overdue. It has been struggling to cope with even our paltry ~60Mbps VDSL (what UK calls Fibre to the Cabinet). But I am very lazy, and change is work.
In theory we can get fibre from Openreach to approach 1Gbit/s down, and I should sort that out, but see above about me being really very lazy. The poor old Soekris would certainly not be viable then.
I’ve replaced it with a PC Engines APU2 (the apu2e2 model). Much like the Soekris it’s a fanless single board x86 computer with coreboot firmware so it’s manageable from the BIOS over serial.
| Soekris net4801 | PC Engines apu2e2 | |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD GX1 1 core @266MHz x86 (32-bit) |
AMD GX-412TC 4 cores @1GHz (turbo 1.4GHz) amd64 (64-bit) |
| Memory | 128MiB | 2048MiB |
| Storage | 512MiB CompactFlash | 16GiB mSATA SSD |
| Ports | 3x 100M Ethernet, 1 serial | 3x 1G Ethernet, 1 serial |
The Soekris ran Debian and so does the APU2. Installing it over PXE was completely straightforward on the APU2; a bit simpler than it was with the net4801 back in 2005! If you have just one and it’s right there in the same building then it’s probably quicker to just boot the Debian installer off of USB though. I may be lazy but once I do get going I’m also pointlessly bloody-minded.
Anyway, completely stock Debian works fine, though obviously it has no display whatsoever — all non-Ethernet-based interaction would have to be done over serial. By default that runs at 115200 baud (8n1).
This is not “home server” material. Like the Soekris even in 2005 it’s weak and it’s expensive for what it is. It’s meant to be an appliance. I think I was right with the Soekris’s endurance, beyond even sensible limits, and I hope I will be right about the APU2.
The Soekris is still using its original 512M CompactFlash card from 2005 by the way. Although admittedly I did go to some effort to make it run on a read-only filesystem, only flipped to read-write for upgrades.
Sad that the APU2 is EoL and no new products will follow. I was very happy with my alix2d3 until I had to move on to something more powerful.
Yeah, though mine I do expect to be in use for a really long time so as I don’t need to buy more I’m not totally crushed by this
It’s a crowded market now, the small form factor PC with multiple high speed interfaces thing. The only tricky bit is finding things that use coreboot or similar so that the BIOS is accessible from serial etc.
Oh I had no idea that APU2 is EOL. So sad to here as I wanted to try one of these out especially with having coreboot support. Now to find new option that has coreboot.