[geeks] Old hardware cut-off

[Joshua Boyd]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 12:01:59AM -0500, Andrew Jones wrote:
> On 02/16/2014 11:45 PM, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> >On 02/16/14 22:30, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> >>If that doesn't work out, there is also the ubiquiti edge router
> >>lite.  It is a dual core MIPS CPU ( Cavium OcteonB CN5020 ) , which
> >>supposedly has some special acceleration, 512megs of ram, 2 gigs of
> >>flash
> >
> >The Mikrotik has a 600MHz processor vs. 500MHz for the
> >Ubiquiti, but doesn't as far as I can see specify number of cores or
> >32/64 bit.
> 
> Watching people fight about awful embedded chips just kills me.  In
> 2014, a $20 Netra X1 is still a "fast enough" UNIX box with plenty
> of RAM.  It eats 20-40W.  If you are sweating electrical costs for
> less power than a light bulb, power isn't the real problem.

I wonder how PowerPC and MIPs chips designed for networking are
automatically awful?
 
> I won't go gently into that good night.  As long as I have a place
> to put the noisy bastard, I'd rather have a real system than haggle
> over the details of embedded boards.

Doesn't the X1 only have 2 fast ethernet ports and no PCI? 

How much bandwidth can it push between interfaces?

If I was in a settling mood, it would be good enough, but still more
work than settling for an ARM box or an Alix running PFSense.  If I'm
not in a settling mood, I'd like to have 3 ports, one for WAN at 50MB
with an option for 105 in the future, one for GigE, and one for 300Mb
WiFi (over a GigE port), and I want to route from wifi to the GigE
side at full speed, and also posibly use the machine as a VPN end
point.

Can the EdgeRouter series do all that?  It claims to be able to, but
after getting it, I settled for configuring it and haven't persued
actually doing the rest of what I want with it.