FreeBSD on Soekris Hardware

I 'love' my net4801, so these would be my answers. Apologies if they weren't questions :)

Installing:

I do it the easy way, which is to plug a Compact Flash card into an CF - IDE adaptor on a larger faster computer, and proceed the usual way. It isn't much harder to do it the tftp way of course:

http://www.xinu.nl/unix/soekris/net4801/

It refers to FreeBSD-4.8 but I'm sure the information would apply to more recent releases. I'm running 6.3 currently:

> uname -a
FreeBSD soekris.*****.co.uk 6.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE #1: Tue Feb 10 20:32:25 GMT 2009 john@soekris.*****.co.uk:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/SOEKRIS-BRIDGE i386

Maintenance:

Easy enough as soon as sshd is up and running. I managed to break it once by trying to source upgrade from 4.n to 6.n. Completely forgetting that half of the file system (/var, /tmp, /usr etc.) was on an external USB drive!

There are a few adjustments necessary to make the entire POST and booting process visible on a serial terminal, which I'll dig out of my notes if anyone needs it.

Applications:

Mine served as firewall (pf) and mail server (sendmail) for about 4 years non stop, but these days I use it for simulating bad network links with a dummynet bridge. It's ideal for that, as sis0 is on the LAN and sis1 and sis2 form the bridge.
 
I'm also using Soekris with two 4GB CF card. I've installed both FreeBSD and Debian and it works as a firewall. I'm also using it as silent BT client with extended storage via USB.
 
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