[geeks] Old hardware cut-off

[Phil Stracchino]

On 02/16/14 17:22, Cory Smelosky wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Feb 2014, Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> In a related topic, I think P4s (and earlier gen processors) have out-lived
>> their practical life outside of running simple software for little kids,
>> thoughts? Their compute power vs power costs are getting hard to justify...
> 
> I just hate the PIII and P4 series with a burning passion. ;)

Though my old single-P3 box was doing a perfectly fine job as my
router/firewall bastion host, and I *like* building my own, my studies
of what's out there by way of replacements that can do the job have been
convincing me that it's pretty damned hard to justify actually doing it.
 I finally conclusively determined that the single-P4 DL320G2 I was
going to build my replacement on has a dead PCI-X slot, making it
completely useless to me.  Any new hardware I can get that can handle
the required number of network interfaces is massively overpowered for
the job, will cost me between $700 and $1000 to build, and will draw far
more power than necessary.

And then there's Mikrotik.  A friend pointed me at them.  1U rackmount
device with five 10/100/1000 ports, five 10/100 ports, an a/b/g/n
wireless interface, a 600MHz MIPS-BE processor, 64MB of RAM, and 8W
power consumption, for $100....?

Color me sold, I think.  I think the only thing it WON'T do that my old
system did is run Squid as a web filter, and I *should* be able to
divert that onto my application server and still make it function as a
transparent proxy.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino
  Babylon Communications
  phils at caerllewys.net
  phil at co.ordinate.org
  Landline: 603.293.8485