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Beyond which, it already exists. Soekris is an example. Not "open hardware" for the design itself, but open in the sense that it supports open software development (e.g. on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux).

Have you looked at the stuff that Soekris makes?

I just went through this and here's the short summary of my research. DIY - go with a PC Engines Alix board or a Soekris board if Intel NICs matter to you. You can buy them here (link below). Install PFSense. Done. Easy. Or if you want a more command line approach install VyOS. https://soekris.com/ http://www.mini-box.com/ALIX-b... https://www.pfsense.org/ http://vyos.net/wiki/Main_Page If you want an off the shelf solution the best product I've found for the money is by Ubiquiti Networks called Edge Router lite. http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax/ed... As far as VPN acceleration. With the Alix or the Soekris you can have a dedicated Crypto Accelerator. I haven't gotten to the VPN portion of my build yet. It only really matters if you need fast sustained throughput on a point to point IPSEC. If you are just connecting from remote software decoding will probably be fine. PFsense has OpenVPN included and makes this easy. VyOS or another route will require more hands on.

I've been very happy with m0n0wall running on Soekris hardware.

Or Soekris, who make machines with Geode CPUs that consume an average of about 2 watts, unlike any Athlons that would consume many more times that.

Geez, what the fuck.

http://www.pcengines.ch/apu.ht... or
http://soekris.com/products.ht...

You can run a "real PC" on 5-10W, you know. No arcane boot loaders, flashing procedures with the danger of bricking your device looming over your head or obscure architectures which have you set up complicated cross-compiling environments.

Standard x86 with a serial port. It's so nice and easy.

You can try these: http://soekris.com/products/ne...

It's a little on the spendy side, but the Soekris net6501s are fairly small and reliable. They have a proper RS-232 serial port console too. Standard x86 cpus. The 6501 will boot both 64bit and 32bit kernels(even though the Intel Atom E6XX line only officially supports 32bit.

The last time I bought a dedicated device like this, I got a PC Engines WRAP, which is similar to the boards that Soekris sells. For about £100, I got a 266MHz AMD Geode (x86) CPU, a board that could boot from a CF card, and had 3 wired sockets and 2 miniPCI slots (with an 802.11g card in one), a metal case and a couple of antennae. That was quite a few (actually, almost ten) years ago.

The first search result has a similar kit for £139, which is a bit more, but if you shop around you can probably get it for cheaper. That includes a 500MHz x86 CPU and 256MB of RAM, so it will happily run most stock *NIX distributions, or something firewall-centric like pfSense.

NetBSD (or Linux if that is your faith) on a soerkis box. UI is a Unix Shell. What else?

I do not trust commercial routers, not because of NSA-weakened crypto, but because of plain old security holes like unclosed developper backdoors or web administrative interface full of CRSF vulnerabilities

I use a Soerkis box with a PCI DSL board, and I run NetBSD on it

We are using a couple Soekris boxes for some basic monitoring. They are lightweight atom processors with no active cooling and it's designed with networking in min. 4 Gig-E ports on the 6501, and you can get up to 8 more thanks to 2 PCI-E slots available in the rackmount version. Since we are using an mSATA SSD on the board we have no moving parts, so nothing mechanic to fail.

Not all hardware requere 100 watts. You can buy hardware that are meant to be used to build your own router from, like a soekris box. http://soekris.com/

They're called embedded systems. Maybe you've heard of them? Not free, but when you load a Linux distribution tailed for embedded systems (like this one) they're MUCH more stable than anything you can buy at any big-box store (even if you're flashing the firmware with something less retarded).

Try building your own x86 PC that takes 5 watts out of the wall.

Well, you asked for it. I've been a happy customer of these guys no financial gain. This is buying a complete system with case and everything although you get to purchase drives and possibly RAM separately.

http://www.zotacusa.com/

The zbox makes a great, ridiculously overpowered mythtv frontend.

http://soekris.com/

This box is commercial / semi-industrial grade and is basically a router platform ready to go.

You have to carefully avoid google to avoid finding "single digit wattage" PC-like hardware.

Only on /. would a guy paying $75/month for cablemodem to connect to a $2000 gaming PC that gets a new $500 graphics card every couple months worry about 5 watts of electricity, considering that in a civilized area 1 watt costs about $1 per year.

get one of these hardware boxes:

http://soekris.com/

and run openwall (or whatever you want) on it.

it keeps the money OUT of cisco's hands in both hardware and software. you can trust your hardware (no motivation to do evil spy things on generic pc style hardware) and you can trust your software. no one will force something on you, this way.

my soekris box has been running non-stop (other than moves) for years, literally, 5 years or more. no blown caps, no blown power suplies, no 'china syndrome' electrolytics that are on ALL cisco, netgear, etc style circuit boards) and software that just plain works.

tomato firmware (and similar) are cool, but they require vendor hardware and at this point, I'd just assume NOT give cisco ANY (!) of my money for any hardware of any kind.

No, you don't get it. This is mainly aimed at being an HTPC. What you're looking for are these and these.

Quote: "PC Engines is so behind the times that you might as well just go Soekris. Oh wait, they don't have gigE either."

Um, no, you are wrong, AC, they do:

http://soekris.com/catalog/category/view/s/net6501/id/76/

Four Genuine (R) Intel (C) GB adapters, Atom CPU, small form factor, low power consumption.

And no I do not work for or at Soekris....I am rocking a cheap Airlink 101, ten bucks from Fry's.....

This is my exact setup, but I used Soekris hardware with Slackware. A little more expensive than buying consumer-grade hardware and flashing, but I learned a lot and it's much more flexible.

In addition to this you can setup m0n0wall or pfSense using captive portal where users are presented with the TOS and a login when they first connect. I think from a legal point of view this is very important. But IANAL so TIFWIW.
The login can be a shared account that is changed how ever often the hotel staff feels is necessary (unusual traffic in the parking lot). Or they can issue vouchers that expire after a period of time. The latter will of course have more overhead.

I use a few m0n0wall captive portal setups for real estate market centers where hundreds of agents need their own credentials and clients need vouchers. It is incredibly simple, reliable, and free. I use this embedded pc and they work great with 100mb connections.
If you want better reporting and and many more features look into pfSense. I find m0n0 to be sufficient for my needs, if you are look in for a good starting point this would be my first choice.

As others have said, Linux will work with a serial console and that's really all you need if you're CLI based.

There's also Soekris stuff. I've had my trusty net4801 for many years now, running off the same 2GB CF card. I'm running OpenBSD + PF. I originally set it up to provide wireless to my house from a cable connection. Recently I moved into a place that already had wireless, so by simply changing a couple macros in PF, I am now feeding wireless into my wired PC, essentially the same thing as a wireless gateway, but in reverse. Try that with a wireless router you get at Best Buy.

Soekris gear is a bit on the pricey side, but it's pretty damned durable stuff. If you're looking for something cheaper, Atom-based motherboards are relatively inexpensive these days. Get an old case, a new mobo, and a wireless PCI card and you're good to go. I did something similar with an old Pentium Pro for the 3 years prior to the Soekris (which has been running 24/7 now for about 5).

Soekris Engineering makes low power computers that you could easily turn into a router using whatever choice of free/open source operating systems that you like. I have used OpenBSD on one of these with amazing success.

I was thinking Soekris Engineering's vpn accelerator card would help, but it appears to only be able to do 250 Mbps. (You wanted 1 gigabit/s, right?)

That card is really old too. I first read about it probably 10 years ago. I don't think it has changed in that time... I wonder if someone makes a faster accelerator? Then again, what about the GPU? Has anyone tried encryption with GPUs before? They've done other supercomputing tasks. A quick search says they have.

Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format.

Huh? What are you talking about? My favourite hardware online store has an Atom-based motherboard for a whopping 58.90€. Add in a 1GB stick (if you don't already have some lying around, like I do... from dumpster diven machines) for a 23.99€. You can most likely reuse your cases and power supplies (I have an Atom ION 330 motherboard living of a 300W powersupply and that overkill). That's your base system for less than 85€! Matches your "below £100" no?

If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match

Ever heard of Soekris? Sure, they are not *that* cheap and not that high-performance but you were talking "home servers". I have a net5501-70 and it handles pretty much anything I throw at it for home server usage. Of course, that's not in your given budget range...

Now, I admit that these are all x86 machines but currently your machines are too.

Perhaps you can base something on this. Based on XScale processors, but they seem to be out-of-budget too.

Perhaps you might start reavaluate your £100 requirement. I haven't seen any netbook at that price either. £100 ~= 115€. Cheapest netbook I have seen was 199€ and was Linux based. So, I ask you the reverse question; Where can I find a £100 netbook?

Problem is almost all the cheap computers are in netbook format.

Huh? What are you talking about? My favourite hardware online store has an Atom-based motherboard for a whopping 58.90€. Add in a 1GB stick (if you don't already have some lying around, like I do... from dumpster diven machines) for a 23.99€. You can most likely reuse your cases and power supplies (I have an Atom ION 330 motherboard living of a 300W powersupply and that overkill). That's your base system for less than 85€! Matches your "below £100" no?

If I just want the motherboard, or a box without a screen, they assume you're in the embedded/industrial market, with prices to match

Ever heard of Soekris? Sure, they are not *that* cheap and not that high-performance but you were talking "home servers". I have a net5501-70 and it handles pretty much anything I throw at it for home server usage. Of course, that's not in your given budget range...

Now, I admit that these are all x86 machines but currently your machines are too.

Perhaps you can base something on this. Based on XScale processors, but they seem to be out-of-budget too.

Perhaps you might start reavaluate your £100 requirement. I haven't seen any netbook at that price either. £100 ~= 115€. Cheapest netbook I have seen was 199€ and was Linux based. So, I ask you the reverse question; Where can I find a £100 netbook?

doesn't make sense anymore - those projects all took advantage of spare clockcycles which were being provided anyway, and not being used. Modern CPUs throttle themselves right down if they're not loaded, and running a project like that just makes them run at full power when they don't need to. I was running rosetta@home 24/7 on my Q6600, until I realised that it was thrashing my system's cooling so hard that it was making ~ 3x more noise than it needed to be. Luckily I shut it off before I did any mechanical damage to the fans and my system is whisper-quiet again.

Anyway, to bring this back on topic. OP could try rolling his own. (Note: I haven't done this, I don't know whether it would work, and those look frightfully expensive. It just looks like it would be a neat toy, and a geeky talking point)

Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security. Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.

Or perhaps just get a soekris box? I'm pretty sure that the net5501 will handle his needs and it does use as much power as a consumer firewall/router box. It's also the same form factor. No need for extra NICs, it comes with four. Slam OpenBSD on it, configure pf/nat and you're good.

Pretty much any home router in a box that you can buy is going to be rubbish. To be fair, it is pretty impressive what you can get for $30-$50; but intense price sensitivity and competition have pretty much leveled the home router field. You can either get the (impressive for the money; but not good enough) basic model, or you can go cry.

The Ciscos and Junipers of the world will probably cut it(with the distinctly possible exception of older used ones. If you get something from the era where routing a 10Mb lan into a T1 line was Real Serious Stuff, bittorrent over a 30Mb line is going to make it cry expensive enterprise tears); but they are expensive, even used, and many of their features are probably overkill for home applications.

Your best bet might be to run m0n0wall or pfsense. Depending on your tolerance for fan noise, you can either get a basic intel atom board for ~$80 or an embedded x86 board from soekris or pcengines or similar.

That combination will be pretty featureful, quite a bit more powerful than your basic home box, and cheaper than any business box that isn't seriously antiquated.

I'm running FreeBSD on one of these.

    https://www.soekris.com/shop/product_info.php?products_id=85

These things are bullet-proof. You'll want the HDD mounting kit ($10) to install a 2.5" laptop drive. That will be the only moving part.

Soekris Engineering makes some great low-power hardware in your price range. They use AMD Geode processors. I have a net4526 as a home router, and according to my Kill-A-Watt, it uses about 1W on average, in a "diskless" setup (boots from CF card, and runs most things from RAMdisk). They're designed to operate primarily over the serial port. The net5501, which we have at few of at work, are basically the speed of a Pentium II. Not bad for such a low-power device. I run OpenBSD on mine, and we have FreeBSD on a couple at work (FreeBSD has drivers for the Sangoma E1/T1 card), but according to their website you can run Linux on it as well. The newer ones even have temperature and voltage sensors.

We'd like to put that software onto a router and have been looking at Single Board Computers, but have yet to find anything that we like. All it has to run is Linux/BSD with an AMP stack.

Anyone have a recommendation that would be low power. I've looked at beagleboard and wall wart, but really we need 3 Ethernet ports and a wireless card.

A Soekris should meet your requirements and then some.

Everyone that has converted a router to OSS, raise their hand ... Everyone else leave the room.

Why? I build my own using Soekris hardware and call it a day. That's not to say I'm not interested in what other folks are doing, or perhaps more accurately, what they're trying to do and what they're up against.

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

http://www.soekris.com/

Do you recall that we were talking about servers? These aren't even systems. They're boards, used for building embedded applications.

Now you're going to accuse me of weaselling. I did say "servers". Servers generally come with a chassis, a power supply, and (drum roll please) embedded adapters. Show me any x86 server — hell, any x86 system that works off-the-shelf without having to be built into something — and I'll admit I was wrong.

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-1121516.html

I'm actually familiar with that puppy. It's the HP competitor for one of the Sun servers I used to work with. And guess what? It's got an embedded video adapter. As you'd know if you read your own fucking link.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-intel-amt-serial-over-lan-to-the-fullest/

I'll say it one more time, then I'm going to give up. I never said that server systems don't support headless operation. Of course they do. I only said that video support was standard in x86 servers.

Now stop being a retard and google your own fucking links.

Dude, I never get into a Slashdot flamefest without Googling for a few links to help make my case. It's just that I usually don't bother to Google for links that support something I know not to be true.

Pretend that you're a grownup for a few seconds, and admit that you had your facts wrong. Which happens to all of us. So suck it up and admit it. It might be hard on the ego, but it's a lot less work than the rhetorical hoops you have to jump through to avoid admitting a mistakes.

http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

http://www.soekris.com/

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/15351-15351-3328412-241644-241475-1121516.html

You have been able to get serial over TCP/IP for a while too, and Intel even build it in to some boards:

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/using-intel-amt-serial-over-lan-to-the-fullest/

Now stop being a retard and google your own fucking links.

Soekris

Or even kurobox (or, if you read Japanese, here).

And there are other such devices around that allow you to escape the x86 world.

A serial console. As far as I know, this is what serial ports were actually put into computers for in the first place.

Sigh. I wish more people (the home user Slashdot types) would just go buy a serial cable (and/or serial+USB adapter) and see for themselves how trivial it is to set up, and how valuable that setup can be. There's plenty of reasons why one would *want* to rely on serial, aside from the usual "What if the network is down?" scenario.

For added fun (when there's more than one computer involved), consider something like this

The question about bios settings is a good one though, and I don't know.

For the OP and most of us, that's a noop. What I would have suggested instead of a powerhungry P4 (or even PIII), is a soekris box. There's no VGA at all, so the BIOS (and everything else) is accessible via serial only. My "headless" VIA boxes are a PIA by comparison.

Granted, Soekris boxes are typically used to perform networking functions, but setting one up with a hard drive (laptop or SSD ideally) and running a web, IMAP, NFS, Samba, etc. server is common enough and performance is perfectly adequate. A few bucks more, but hey, they're rackmountable so you can impress your friends and neighbours. :-)

Again, the people that understand the difference don't need it explained to them. Those that don't -- the ones that sign the checks -- will just be confused. Now, even more so if you bring up trusted execution.

Sun's been doing encryption offload since well before Via added it on their chips. This is just a new revision of their crypto accelerator board. Personally, I've been using these for years. Cheap and effective.

After running a fire-breathing Celeron 2.5GHz as router/fileserver/torrentbox/freepbx for a few months, I finally bit the bullet and picked up a soekris net5501 and installed pfsense and freeswitch on it. My firewalling and phones run right at well under 20 watts.

Of course that leaves me without fileserver or torrentbox, but an inexpensive alix or fit pc running freenas will fill that role nicely.

Yesterday I found this [terminally...herent.com] wonderful gem of a blog post, which told me about a lot of applications which I can use from the CLI, as well as a series of blog posts from this [wordpress.com] guy, which give you a lot more ideas [wordpress.com] in terms of applications and how to set them up.

I've always wondered why such apps aren't more popular than they are. When used (albeit as a mockup) in a movie or on television, the audience goes "Wow!". That same audience goes home and says "No way!".

The argument, of course, is that it requires advanced knowledge, or that it's simply too hard. No matter that middle-aged secretaries had little trouble using or master disk formatting, file management or WordPerfect in the DOS days, or that the employees at the DMV or at Fry's counter are hardly compsci graduates.

Congrats on your discoveries. Be sure to checkout Soekris boards for more fun.

If the goal is to get legacy DOS software running on new hardware and being robust, then the most rock-solid option (and maybe the cheapest) will be to put it into a VM such as qemu or VMware. This will allow you to transplant it to new hardware, make/restore backups, far more seamlessly.

As for the hardware itself, have you considered a Soekris box or similar?

Nice, but I don't think this is as big a deal as all that. More along the lines of price pressure than anything else. I may buy one, because it is so cheap. Even if I don't, I'm glad everyone else will have to lower their prices now. I've always felt they put on too big a price premium for the small size, considering the generally low performance of the class as a whole.

There are many similar devices already out there. There's the much beloved Linksys WRT54GL. I have a Soekris. Not the most friendly plug and play device ever. I find it easier to update the CF drive by removing it and mounting it on a desktop system and editing files that way, rather than connecting via a serial port terminal. Gumstix is another. Lots of super micro mini ATX form bricks (mini-itx) out there too. Expensive though.

Not familiar with it, but Soekris boxes run just short of that (typically around $300), and they're extremely popular at those prices. I guess I'll have to place future orders with the knowledge that I'm buying discontinued stock.

"I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often..."

Get a Soekris box and roll your own firewall/router. It is not hard to do. My uptime is measured by any changes I make to it.

So, if you made 4 changes to it, your uptime would be 4?

I'm impressed.

"I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often..."

Get a Soekris box and roll your own firewall/router. It is not hard to do. My uptime is measured by any changes I make to it.

"...or anything else running in a custom embedded environment?"

Piece of cake. I put OpenBSD on a 32MB Compact Flash on a Soekris box frequently. And have even built a machine with a serial stepper motor controller and serial LCD screen to agitate BW film using this mobo and OpenBSD. OpenBSD had out-of-the-box support for the gpio header on the board that made it easy to make a Python module from the C source to read buttons and switches.

Soekris Engineering vpn1401 and vpn1411

These two small hardware security accelerators deliver excellent performance at a competetive price, off loading the CPU of the computing intensive tasks of encryption and compression. They are perfect for low cost and low power VPN Routers like the net4501 and net4801, and can deliver at throughput of up to 250Mbps doing encryption and compression, more than enough for use at T3, E3, OC-3 and Fast Ethernet speeds.

They are available in two versions with the same functionality and performance, one for the standard 33/66 Mhz 32 bit PCI bus, and one for the Mini-PCI type III form factor, perfect for use in the net4501, net4801, and net5501.

http://www.soekris.com/vpn1401.htm

Due to the increasing trend to cut corners to maximize profits, it's no surprise that most (if not all) consumer-level routers are complete garbage (yay capitalism! ). The solution? Make a fun weekend project out of building your own. All it takes is an old functional computer, Linux (or BSD), a few NICs, and a good Linux (or BSD) router/firewall howto. Or, if you don't want to bother with configuring it yourself, check out projects like m0n0wall. If you really want something slick, check out using one of the many embedded systems on the market. It'll cost you a little more, but you'll have one slick little router. I personally like the Soekris systems for building a router out of. I've been running the Soekris net4521 with Pyramid Linux on it and have never had any issues with stability or lockups.

I only reboot my router when the power goes out in my house (a few times a year?). I use a PC Engines WRAP board running monowall and it is rock solid. It is pretty green using only ~1.5W. http://www.pcengines.ch/ Soekris makes similar boards. http://soekris.com/ Monowall rules. http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Mine isn't, but it could be: http://www.soekris.com/