[geeks] Anti-Recommendation: Phylon

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

My home network, like most of yours, I'm sure, is a continually-evolving
mess of hacks that I rely upon daily to do useful, productive, paying
work.  It's grown from a SPARCstation LX with a Linux dial-out gateway
to an Indigo2 and an Octane with an OpenBSD cablemodem gateway to its
more recent incarnation of a pile of Suns, two[0] of which served as my
gateway.

Because last yeag I'd been having a year where customers actually paid
me without my having to show up and shout at them, I decided in October
or to to splurge on a new gateway box that would be faster and consume
far less power than two Suns, so I got a Phylon 7F2WE-1G5 system board
(a Phylon knock-off of VIA's EPIA EN15000 board) and a Phylon IC01
mini-ITX case.

A VIA-owned company is currently one of my largest customers, and their
processors are, I believe, Good Things, so I wanted that as a platform.
The crypto acceleration and power consumption alone are enough to
justify the use of the C7 CPU in my gateway system.  However, VIA
doesn't seem to think you'd want multiple Ethernet interfaces in such a
box, so the EPIA platforms generally come with one port.

Phylon, on the other hand, has a three-port daughtercard for their
boards, which means you can have -four- independent Ethernet ports with
a decently-fast processor in a box a little smaller than an O'Reilly
book and roughly 1U tall.  Score!

So far, I'm on my third daughterboard in five months.  The ports keep
burning out, whether I use them or not.  OpenBSD locks solid if I try to
bring the port live.  Windows XP just never sees traffic on the port.
As the port starts to die, I'll see OpenBSD register large amounts of
mbuf memory consumed by the interface (no, this isn't the IPv6 exploit;
those interfaces face inside), and eventually transmits start to time
out.  Or, I'll find out when I go to restart dhcpd, and the process just
wedges trying to put it in promiscuous mode.

While removing the second daughter card from the tiny box, the (Phylon)
DC-DC power supply came apart in my hands.  The disk/CF tray for that
(Phylon) case doesn't properly line up with the ports on the (Phylon)
motherboard (apparently by design).  The reseller notes this last known
problem on their website, but the whole deal has been frustrating, to
say the least.

I haven't RMAed this third daughtercard yet, and I don't know if I plan
to.  This third outage will have me miss a deadline for a customer and
end up getting no sleep last night, so I might just take it out on a
hill somewhere and plink it to death with a .22.

I haven't decided what I'm going to purchase to replace this little
nightmare, but I am absolutely certain that it -will not- be made by
Phylon/Jetway.


[0] An Ultra 5 to do routing/firewalling/caching/DNS and an Ultra 1e to
     do PPPoE.  Why two?  Because this connection wasn't originally
     supposed to -have- PPPoE; $telco -promised- me that, and I was in a
     rush, and found it much easier to just toss up a PPPoE "abstraction"
     box than figure out how to make PPPoE and pf play nicely together.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "If we keep our pride, though paradise is lost, we
Elgin, TX        (   will pay the price, but we cannot count the cost."
USA               )                             --Neil Peart, "Bravado"