On Sat, 23 May 2009, Bill Campbell wrote:
On Sat, May 23, 2009, Les Mikesell wrote:
Bill Campbell wrote:
Any comments on CentOS 5 on Intel Atom CPUs?
I need to build a couple of inexpensive systems that will be used primarily as gateway/firewall systems with OpenVPN, and need recommendations in reliable hardware platforms. These will need two NICs.
I haven't tried it, but I thought you could run openvpn on many of the small routers like the Linksys WRT54G that allow re-flashing with replacement firmware. They are probably more reliable than anything with a disk.
I haven't tried the WRT54Gs, but have used quite a few BEFVP41 LinkSys VPN boxes. I would not call them particularly reliable, as we have had most fail within 2 years.
I have about 10 wrt54g's distributed at friends and family and haven't had a single failure in about 5 years time. One of them was reported to be broken and was put a few months outside as garbage when I recovered it from my nephew, reflashed and it is still working fine.
The syslinux firmware is not as good as dd-wrt (which I prefer) and openwrt. But the fact that you can replace them easily, and backup and restore the configuration makes them perfect black boxes with little maintenance required.
I have 2 spare wrt54g's that I used for updating the firmware. Keep the old one and restore the config on a new one, swap and leave the old one for a week or two that when in case of a firmware problem, you can just swap the old one again. This technique was useful once with a buggy dd-wrt release. The other wrt54g I use for conferences :)
And you can't beat the price. I don't know how well it can handle 5 parallel openvpn connections though, so you might want to look into that first.