Building my first gateway firewall with wireless support

[Ian Smith]

On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Bob Keyes wrote:
 > On Mon, 3 Mar 2008, Aaron Siegel wrote:
 > > My almost ten year old pc that has been running 24/7 as a firewall gateway is
 > > about to die.  (Of course it is running Freebsd) I would like to build a
 > > embedded gateway, DNS server, with DDNS client, wireless access point,
 > > IPSEC , and firewall.

[.. lots of useful stuff ..]

 > > I am looking at Soekris 48xx and if needed the vpn board.. As of now I
 > > like to stick with x86 platform. Any other suggestions?
 > 
 > I believe that soekris stuff is coming to end-of-life. You may want to
 > check out alternatives. PC Engines made something called WRAP, and there's
 > a replacement board for it that's supposed to be pretty good. I used
 > soekris boards quite a bit and have mixed feelings about them. Don't
 > stress them too hard, and don't try to do PoE.

Only the net-48xx series are at end-of-life, due to CPU unavailability. 
Soekris are giving no indication of not proceding with everything else.

Aaron, of course do check out all alternatives, but the net-5501 looks
likely useful for what you want to run, and takes either vpn board.

I'm saving up .. anyone else concur with 'not streesing them too hard'?

cheers, Ian