Hardware

Hello Everybody,

I am very interested in m0n0wall as was looking at deploying across a wide range of users in a developing country, however cost is a sensitive point.

Please could I ask you to list the best possible hardware at the cheapest prices so that I can look into feasibility?

Thanks

Ryan

Not sure what you have readily available to you. Old PC's are probably the cheapest and easiest to find, though I'm speaking from the point of view of an American. Old PC's can be found easily for free or very little cost here, you probably don't have that same luxury. Still, that is the first thing I would check into.

The cheapest new hardware you'll be able to find are probably WRAP or Soekris boards. That's not really "cheap" though, at around $200-300 USD each. I could probably get my hands on 10 old PC's for that much money, if cost was the only concern.

Hi Ryan,
Not sure where you are. If you are based in UK I may be able to point you in the direction of 20 - 30 old PII 350Mhz machines.  If interested PM me.

Mark.

[developing country]

Hi Ryan,
Not sure where you are. If you are based in UK I may be able to point you in the direction of 20 - 30 old PII 350Mhz machines.  If interested PM me.

Mark.

hi hi hi, i like that to put the UK the same as

deploying across a wide range of users in a developing country

.

any way, may be power consumption is also an issue? so old mini itx pc with cf card might do the job? but most old pc takes some electric power... for m0n0wall you really don't need a power house pc. as mark writes a pentium ii with some mem (min 64mb) is enough.

That's a good point, if power is costly, the cost differential between powering any full PC and a WRAP or similar embedded board could be adequate to make up the purchase price difference between the two. A WRAP only uses about 3-4 watts, where basically any full PC is going to use 30 times that much and some much more than that.

Power is a concern no matter where one is.  However, a net4501/wrap sips 6 watts routing flat out vs a stripped down p3-666 which slurps 26 by my testing with a slightly older version of m0n0wall ( see www.fractured.org/routers ).  The net4501 cost about twice what the stripped down p3 cost me and the difference in power consumption would take more than 2 years to recoup that $100.00 even at california's absurd $0.25/kwhr.  The time to recover would be far shorter if the only cheap machines he could find were power hogs.

On the other hand, a soekris/wrap might be better suited for solar installations running from a 12v battery and a 25 watt solar panel.