Soekris Net4801 review [fr]

I have been using the Soekris Net4801 for a few years and here are my impressions

The good

• This computer is small, power efficient, reliable and hacker-friendly.
• It just has the needed hardware to make a decent router out-of-the-box and a little bit more.
• It comes with a serial console to make configuration easy.
• The BIOS can be set up, upgraded and flashed from the serial port.
• It has GPIOs if you want to add custom hardware.
• Bootable compact flash slot: enable you to build a router with no moving parts.
• If the compact flash do not meet your needs, there is an optional bracket and cable to plug an IDE laptop harddisk.
• One PCI slot and one mini-PCI slot for extensions like a WiFi card

The bad

• This machine is underpowered: if you ask a little bit more than routing to the machine (file serving, playing MP3’s, imap server,…), performances are going straight to the toilet and you end up waiting… waiting… waiting…
• Lack of USB ports: There is only one USB 1.0 port on the machine, limiting its potential.
• The CF card slot is on the same IDE bus than the harddisk: if you want to use both, make sure the harddisk is configured as a slave device. You might want to test several compact flash cards for compatibility: many CF cards have a buggy IDE/ATA interface that will cause you headaches.

This machine should not be used as a file server due to the poor disk I/O performances, even with DMA on. I would like to see a similar setup with an Intel Atom CPU, a decent chipset and 4 USB 2.0 ports, then we would have a killer home server appliance.

Where to buy (europe)

I bought my board via Wim Vandeputte. This guy is reliable and is present at every event related to the free software movement.