Jetway box

[poly_s]

Hello.

I've been using pfsense at home providing openvpn when on the road and all the other good stuff that pfsence makes easy.

The beige box its been running on has bitten the dust. I'm looking at this Jetway box to buy for my new set up.

http://jetwaycomputer.com/JBC373F38.html

What do you think? If no one can see any problems then I'm going to get it.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[jasonlitka]

That's pretty old hardware.  Several generations behind the newest Atoms.  Being a 3.5" SBC it's probably not very cost-effective either.

[poly_s]

when you say cost effective do you mean power consumption?

It has four eth ports so i can set up a network for home and one for my wifes work computers.

what would you suggest as a better option?

thanks for your input.

[jasonlitka]

No, I mean cost-effective, as in price paid. It's probably the same price or a bit higher than a. current Atom.

You haven't said anything about your requirements (throughput, number of ports, packages, users, etc.) so a recommendation isn't really possible.

[poly_s]

I was running pfsense on a pentium 4 so as long as thisjetwaybox runs pfsense faster than the old box i should be happy.

I like the 4 ports and at 250 bones the price is right.

Its basically for just a few users and a vpn for one.

thx

[jasonlitka]

@poly_s:

I was running pfsense on a pentium 4 so as long as thisjetwaybox runs pfsense faster than the old box i should be happy.

I like the 4 ports and at 250 bones the price is right.

Its basically for just a few users and a vpn for one.

thx

It will certainly have lower power consumption, but it might be faster and it might not be.  The Atom 330 is pretty slow.  See the link below for a Tom's Hardware article on the 230, D510 (5-10% faster than a 330, mostly due to a small bump in clock speed), and a pair of P4 CPUs.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-d510-pentium-4-nettop,2649.html

Depending on your VPN throughput requirements neither may work well for you.

[poly_s]

interesting

thanks for this article.

looks like the atom in this jetway is better in most of the catagories i'm conserned with.

shame my p4 died but i guess the electricity bill will go down.

any thoughts on the realtex nics?

[jasonlitka]

@poly_s:

any thoughts on the realtex nics?

Realtek 10/100 NICs are absolute trash.  Their Gig-E NICs are a bit better but I still feel strongly enough about them to say "crap". That said, I've used them in the past and they'll get the job done as long as you don't need more than a few hundred Mbit/s of throughput.