Hi,
Last week I finished installing a small network in a private school : one server (an old IBM X225), seventeen desktops (Fujitsu Siemens PIV 2.4 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD), all running CentOS 5.5.
One extra machine is acting as a router, in that it is installed between the DSL modem and the network, with two Ethernet cards, and it's taking care of DHCP, DNS, NTP and also acts like a proxy (with Squid). It seems quite big and noisy and electricity-consuming to me, so I wonder if there is any small device that could possibly do the job as good, but which would me more adapted : small, solid and cheap (if possible). I imagine some tiny box just with a CPU and a small harddisk, a little RAM and two network interfaces (one out, one in), where I could install a very stripped-down CentOS, and then just forget about it.
So far, I've googled a bit, and I've found two things: 1) Pyramid Soekris boards, where I can put something like Pyramid Linux on it. And 2) The Linksys WRT54GL, for which there are Linux firmwares like OpenWRT and DD-WRT.
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
Cheers,
Niki
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Niki Kovacs said the following on 22/11/10 07:51:
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
Consider a type of hardware that needs to be "always on" for a long period of time maybe in a dirty and hot environment. Also the availability of long time vendor support is an important issue.
When I needed this type of hardware for similar missions, I found that the cheapest solution is an entry level server of Dell or HP. They are very silent, compact, well supported by CentOS and they can be purchased without pre-installed OEM software.
Both have some BIOS options that you can set to lower power consumption.
Just one thing: keep in mind that HP ProLiant 1xx series has ony 1 year of on site warranty, compared to 3 years of other ProLiant, at least in Europe.
Ciao, luigi
- -- / +--[Luigi Rosa]-- \
This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us. --Memo della Western Union, 1878
2010/11/22 Niki Kovacs contact@kikinovak.net:
Hi,
Last week I finished installing a small network in a private school : one server (an old IBM X225), seventeen desktops (Fujitsu Siemens PIV 2.4 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD), all running CentOS 5.5.
One extra machine is acting as a router, in that it is installed between the DSL modem and the network, with two Ethernet cards, and it's taking care of DHCP, DNS, NTP and also acts like a proxy (with Squid). It seems quite big and noisy and electricity-consuming to me, so I wonder if there is any small device that could possibly do the job as good, but which would me more adapted : small, solid and cheap (if possible). I imagine some tiny box just with a CPU and a small harddisk, a little RAM and two network interfaces (one out, one in), where I could install a very stripped-down CentOS, and then just forget about it.
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=40 is nice. just install cf card and centos or something on it .. I personally prefer pfsense on my firewall.
-- Eero
On 11/21/10 10:51 PM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
Alix2D2 or similar. http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d2.htm
they sell for about $80, add a flash card or small HD to hold your router software, they have little minicases to mount them, http://www.pcengines.ch/case1c1blku.htm http://www.yawarra.com.au/en-alix.php
these run pfSense very nicely, which is a very nice turnkey router distribution.
On 11/21/10 10:51 PM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
Alix2D2 or similar. http://www.pcengines.ch/alix2d2.htm
they sell for about $80, add a flash card or small HD to hold your router software, they have little minicases to mount them, http://www.pcengines.ch/case1c1blku.htm http://www.yawarra.com.au/en-alix.php
these run pfSense very nicely, which is a very nice turnkey router distribution.
Yes, ALIX+pfSense is highly recommended. If ALIX is too slow (it should do between 50 and 70 MBit/s), consider Atom D510 platform servers. They should run on ~50 Watt and easily saturate 100-200Mbit. ALIX takes 5-10 Watt.
At Mon, 22 Nov 2010 07:51:46 +0100 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Hi,
Last week I finished installing a small network in a private school : one server (an old IBM X225), seventeen desktops (Fujitsu Siemens PIV 2.4 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD), all running CentOS 5.5.
One extra machine is acting as a router, in that it is installed between the DSL modem and the network, with two Ethernet cards, and it's taking care of DHCP, DNS, NTP and also acts like a proxy (with Squid). It seems quite big and noisy and electricity-consuming to me, so I wonder if there is any small device that could possibly do the job as good, but which would me more adapted : small, solid and cheap (if possible). I imagine some tiny box just with a CPU and a small harddisk, a little RAM and two network interfaces (one out, one in), where I could install a very stripped-down CentOS, and then just forget about it.
So far, I've googled a bit, and I've found two things: 1) Pyramid Soekris boards, where I can put something like Pyramid Linux on it. And 2) The Linksys WRT54GL, for which there are Linux firmwares like OpenWRT and DD-WRT.
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
One *simple* option would be to get a "small" IDE (I assume the existing router machine is IDE based) SSD (or a 32G Compact Flash card + IDE adaptor -- see eBay) and replace the IDE hard drive with this and pull out the case fan (or just unplug its power connector). Remove its keyboard / mouse / monitor. Much of the noise and power use is the disk drive and fan (for the disk drive).
Cheers,
Niki _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Mon, 22 Nov 2010, Robert Heller wrote:
One *simple* option would be to get a "small" IDE (I assume the existing router machine is IDE based) SSD (or a 32G Compact Flash card + IDE adaptor -- see eBay) and replace the IDE hard drive with this and pull out the case fan (or just unplug its power connector). Remove its keyboard / mouse / monitor. Much of the noise and power use is the disk drive and fan (for the disk drive).
Really? Even a meaty 3.5" drive will be less than 10W, and you're between 4 and 5 for a low power unit. Something like a 1Tb Samsung Ecogreen is around 4.3W. The CPU in the system is going to draw a whole lot more than that. But face it, if it's just acting as a router, it can completely spin that down after boot anyway.
CPU and motherboard contribute a fair whack to the power consumption.
I've no specific recommendations, but clearly something like the following gets you close.
http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/EB2410ITX/
Get the gold board and you've got twin 10/100Mbit network, 128Mbyte RAM, various ways of connecting extra storage, and a 2.3W maximum power draw.
That compares rather well with the old Pentium 4 you're likely to have knocking round which draws about 70W typically just for the CPU...
jh
2010/11/22 Niki Kovacs contact@kikinovak.net:
one server (an old IBM X225), seventeen desktops all running CentOS 5.5.
One extra machine is acting as a router, in that it is installed between the DSL modem and the network, with two Ethernet cards, and it's taking care of DHCP, DNS, NTP and also acts like a proxy (with Squid).
- quite big and noisy and electricity-consuming to me,.
I've found two things: 1) Pyramid Soekris boards, where I can put something like Pyramid Linux on it. And 2) The Linksys WRT54GL, for which there are Linux firmwares like OpenWRT and DD-WRT.
I would want to spare substantial effort and to keep things simple and stupid. I would:
1) migrate all services DHCP, DNS, NTP and Squid to the X225 server 2) Use the Linksys WRT54GL for routing/gateway. I would not bother installing the OpenWRT.
I would do this, unless I am looking forward to increase my expertise in home built routers.
Kind regards, Alex
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
The Linksys is going to be your cheapest option and will take the least amount of time to setup. It is also the least featureful. As far as support goes, just buy a spare and keep it around in case something goes wrong with the primary unit. In my experience, I've never had to reboot a Linksys running tomato. However, I have had bad power adapters or routers die in the past, so I would keep a spare for any application that required mid level availability.
pfsense (a fork of monowall) is great on any device I've tried it on. And it should offer basic DNS and NTP serving ability that the Linksys may lack. Your performance/availability is going to be limited by your hardware here as well. If you need high availability, I'd recommend a name brand Dell/HP/etc with a warranty and redundant hardware. If some downtime is acceptable to the the client, then perhaps forgo the redundancy but keep the warranty or get a spare box.
The great thing about the Linksys is that it will likely pay for itself inside of a year due to the lower operating costs and low initial investment. A server based box may not pay for itself, but could provide additional features (enhanced security, VPN, authenticated wifi hotspot, etc) that would be worthwhile to the client.
Blake Hudson a écrit :
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
Thanks for the many answers in this thread. I'm not a native speaker, so one more question. Does "tomato" firmware mean the original firmware as installed by Linksys, or some third-party firmware like OpenWRT and DD-WRT?
Cheers,
Niki
On 11/22/10 12:48 PM, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Blake Hudson a écrit :
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
Thanks for the many answers in this thread. I'm not a native speaker, so one more question. Does "tomato" firmware mean the original firmware as installed by Linksys, or some third-party firmware like OpenWRT and DD-WRT?
Tomato is another 3rd party firmware. it only runs on 'classic' WRT54G* whereas dd-wrt runs on a wider range. Tomato has a cleaner user interface, quite good QoS ('traffic shaping') features, and is always free, while the DD-Wrt project manager took DD-Wrt partially proprietary, to the annoyance of a lot of the contributors who understood it to be GPL.
pfSense is still my favorite choice, running on a low power miniboard like the ALIX or various Atom mini-systems.
Niki Kovacs wrote:
Blake Hudson a écrit :
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
Thanks for the many answers in this thread. I'm not a native speaker, so one more question. Does "tomato" firmware mean the original firmware as installed by Linksys, or some third-party firmware like OpenWRT and DD-WRT?
Third party. I have friends who swear by it. http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato is the first hit when you google tomato wrt54gl
mark
It depends on what hardware you have available and what all you would like to play with...I run both tomato and pfsense and both are great products but both serve a particular setting...I use tomato for AP's primarily but also use it for a soho router much better than linksys...but if you want more routing functionality/security like openvpn and more available packages to play with then pfsense is a good choice...if you want or need more filtering capabilities then you could also look at untangle (much more hardware intensive) or endian...I have used/using all of the above...all of them have advantages and tradeoffs just depends on what your requirements are...
On 11/22/10, m.roth@5-cent.us m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
Niki Kovacs wrote:
Blake Hudson a écrit :
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
Thanks for the many answers in this thread. I'm not a native speaker, so one more question. Does "tomato" firmware mean the original firmware as installed by Linksys, or some third-party firmware like OpenWRT and DD-WRT?
Third party. I have friends who swear by it. http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato is the first hit when you google tomato wrt54gl
mark
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 10:09 -0800, Blake Hudson wrote: <SNIP>
+1 for Linksys WRT54GL and tomato firmware +1 for pfsense (or monowall) on a small server
<SNIP>
I love my ASUS RT-N16 running DD-WRT although I have heard from friends that tomato is superior. With a 480mhz processor, 128mb of ram, and 32mb of flash its a beastly little residential router with the right software running on it. I haven't touched it since I set it up other than to upgrade to the latest DD-WRT. My wife's TV obsession combined with my torrent traffic has made my life miserable with more than one router running a proprietary firmware.
Unfortunately I don't have any numbers as to how much traffic this thing can actually handle, but I can only assume that it's much higher than the Linksys models with lower specifications. DD-WRT gives me all the control I need over my home network, but it certainly wouldn't be enough for all situations.
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Asus_RT-N16#Specs_:
root@AsusRT-N16:~# uptime 20:16:50 up 102 days, 23:37, load average: 0.01, 0.02, 0.00
root@AsusRT-N16:/proc# cat cpuinfo system type : Broadcom BCM4716 chip rev 1 processor : 0 cpu model : MIPS 74K V4.0 BogoMIPS : 239.20 wait instruction : no microsecond timers : yes tlb_entries : 64 extra interrupt vector : no hardware watchpoint : yes ASEs implemented : mips16 dsp shadow register sets : 1 VCED exceptions : not available VCEI exceptions : not available
dcache hits : 2147483648 dcache misses : 3732208860 icache hits : 2147483648 icache misses : 4277960450 instructions : 2147483648
root@AsusRT-N16:/proc# cat meminfo total: used: free: shared: buffers: cached: Mem: 127946752 17866752 110080000 0 1900544 6295552 Swap: 0 0 0 MemTotal: 124948 kB MemFree: 107500 kB MemShared: 0 kB Buffers: 1856 kB Cached: 6148 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 1751 kB Inactive: 729 kB HighTotal: 0 kB HighFree: 0 kB LowTotal: 124948 kB LowFree: 107500 kB SwapTotal: 0 kB SwapFree: 0 kB Dirty: 0 kB Writeback: 0 kB Mapped: 364 kB Slab: 178 kB CommitLimit: 62472 kB Committed_AS: 4344 kB PageTables: 2001 kB VmallocTotal: 786388 kB VmallocUsed: 40 kB VmallocChunk: 786332 kB
Niki Kovacs ha scritto:
Hi,
Last week I finished installing a small network in a private school : one server (an old IBM X225), seventeen desktops (Fujitsu Siemens PIV 2.4 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HD), all running CentOS 5.5.
One extra machine is acting as a router, in that it is installed between the DSL modem and the network, with two Ethernet cards, and it's taking care of DHCP, DNS, NTP and also acts like a proxy (with Squid). It seems quite big and noisy and electricity-consuming to me, so I wonder if there is any small device that could possibly do the job as good, but which would me more adapted : small, solid and cheap (if possible). I imagine some tiny box just with a CPU and a small harddisk, a little RAM and two network interfaces (one out, one in), where I could install a very stripped-down CentOS, and then just forget about it.
So far, I've googled a bit, and I've found two things: 1) Pyramid Soekris boards, where I can put something like Pyramid Linux on it. And 2) The Linksys WRT54GL, for which there are Linux firmwares like OpenWRT and DD-WRT.
Is there anything you could especially recommend for this job? (I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, BTW :oD)
Cheers,
Niki _______________________________________________
Hi Niki, I would like to suggest the Tp-Link TL-WR1043ND; it could be a little more expensive than the Linksys, but it has a more powerful cpu, more ram and an usb port (and more or less same power consumption) for around 50 Euros.
I'm using it with the original firmware, and I tested OpenWRT on it; next I will try endian, but I have to say that I'm very satisfied with it and I would recomend it: the system is fast and responsive, and the usb port adds really a lot of flexibility (eg. file sharing, usb dongle backup, squid with cache and so on...).
HTH Regards Lorenzo
-
Alexander Georgiev -
Blake Hudson -
Eero Volotinen -
John Hodrien -
John R Pierce -
Lorenzo Quatrini -
Luigi Rosa -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Niki Kovacs -
rainer＠ultra-secure.de -
Robert Heller -
Todd Edwards -
Tom Bishop