[Cerowrt-devel] nuc stuff

[Dave Täht]

On 2/15/16 8:11 AM, dpreed at reed.com wrote:

> BTW, I went shopping for a pure home "gateway" box.  What pleased me was this board, because I am sure it has the "oomph" to deal with up to Gigabit packet processing (which is where all the current residential ISPs will shortly be).  It has room for RAM and a good mini-PCIe card, as well as a modest mSATA drive. You can use virtualization to provide isolation between parts.
> 
> 
> - Jetway NU93-2930 NUC Form Factor Intel Celeron N2930 SoC Bay Trail 2 Intel LAN, 2 Display, 2 x HDMI, 1 x SATA2 port, full-size mSATA, half-size mini-PCIE, 1 External COM, 3xUSB2, 1xUSB3, Audio, 9V-24V DC-in (size 4" x 4" x 1.5").
> 
> - 8 GB SODIMM ($35)
> - 32 GB mSATA ($30)
> - 12v Wallwart


Oh, goodie. I've been a very happy user of the nuc based products for
quite some time now (it is generally my main desktop box and I use two
as load generators). The linux support for the graphics chipset,
ethernet drivers, etc, is excellent, the fan, quiet, the speed adaquate
for everything except big compiles (where I am spoilt by having a big
box in the cloud). I would hope it is a good box for bsd/pfsense also.

It is a really good box for server/IoT controller/Torrent/development
duties as well, and having one as my main router to the internet has
always been an option (I do not mind having wifi on a separate box anymore)

Finding one with dual ethernet ports was always a problem.

Problems are:

0) Internal wifi antennas may suck. Still the basic case and device are
229 on amazon + memory.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00SHYW6US/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=AEELF2HAVZFED

Ordered one with the tall case. Thx!

I am very tired of not having a full OS on the firewall/gateway and will
give this a shot. I am pretty sure that things like openwrt derived
odhcp6 and so on will be of help....

1) The msata slot is full length. The wifi slot is half length which
restricts you to using half length cards. Only 2x2 802.11n is achievable
in that form factor.

Since I wanted 3x3 or 802.11ac support...

I experimented with using a usb3 stick as a hard disk, roached two (and
it was slow) so I gave up on that and went with an external usb3 hard
disk - and recently found a usb3 to msata adaptor which is working
pretty well.

Then they came up with a taller case so you can use a regular sata disk.
I have kept hoping to find something I could mirror with, like this:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AYI276I?psc=1
or this
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ITJ7WDC/ref=pd_luc_rh_mrairec_01_04_t_img_lh?ie=UTF8&psc=1

2) Although this looks to be less powerful than other (i3, i5) nucs I've
had, the default ethernet driver does do TSO offloads. You *can* turn
them off and I think 1GigE forwarding rates are possible - otherwise,
cake would be needed. Will find out tomorrow.

I have totally lost track of the differentiation between atom and
celeron - I was using the rangeley platform elsewhere...

3) The edgerouter X provides about 250mbit dual ports for 50 bucks.
The linksys ac1200 can do gigE with cake, but it's still a bit buggy.

...

Other items maybe worth playing with on other hardware were things like

http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Port-mSATA-Components-SD-PEX40079/dp/B00KKO6N98/ref=sr_1_3?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1455560175&sr=1-3&keywords=msata+raid