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Old 24th June 2008
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Oko Oko is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Kosovo, Serbia
Posts: 1,102
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I just want to toss couple of ideas.

I understand why people like soekris and alix boards. They are fanless and spend very little electricity. I like them too. But boy they are over priced at list in U. S. where I live (although in the long run they are cheap comparing to standard PCs due to the electric consumption). They go for anywhere $140-$300.

Jetway Mini ITX are half the price of Alix boards (Jetway is around $60) and almost 4 times cheaper than Soekris. They are based on
VIA 3 or VIA 7 chip sets so that is soekris for all practical purposes (yes they also make Intel and AMD based boards that do have cooling fans but are far more powerful. (too powerful for an embedded appliance).

The another idea is just getting full blown server like
Sun Microsystems Netra T1 500MHZ 512MB (and this is RISK so this is like
2GHz Intel based board)
Those can be found on ebay for less than $50. There is no way that soekris
will cost you less than $400 at the end of the day after you buy enclosure, RAM, power supply and whatever else you going to put. So you will have to go at least year or two years before recovering money through your electric bills
if you go Soekris route VS Netra route.

For the lovers of Intel hardware older 1U Poweredge DeLL servers can be easily found for less than $100.

On that Netra or Poweredge you can run firewall for a big corporation let
alone for home office.

P.S. Disclaimer: SUN sparc64 hardware is only good for people who run OpenBSD. Even NetBSD has problems running newer SUN sparc64 chip sets.

FreeBSD is in my point of view i386 and AMD specific OS.

Last edited by Oko; 24th June 2008 at 04:44 AM.
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