On Wed, 11 May 2005, Mark Uemura wrote: > > > http://www.commell-sys.com/Product/IPC/EMB-564.htm > > > I have one of these. "Good" serial BIOS is a relative term. No PC BIOS > > based system have very good serial consoles. > > Since you have one, how does it compare with the Soekris or Nexcom? > > I value your opinion. I've not had any experience with the other two > so I'm curious to know what you think. > > Thanks for your input. > > Cheers, > > Mark T. Uemura
If all you want to do is route packets I'd stick with the Soekris. If you're trying to do other things that require more CPU look at one of the alternatives. I purchased the Commell board in a case designed for it, there is an access panel for the CF socket. The PCI slot becomes unusable in the case. The board I purchased also uses the Intel NIC's for 3/100M & 1/1G NICs. We purchased these to evaluate using the bozes with OpenBSD PF and pfflowd to provide flow information from around our network. I would purchase the Commell board again, but to be honest I haven't really stressed it that much. By the end of this month I should have a couple of these, http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_dp_spec.jsp?motherboardId=321 , in my hands. They also come with serial BIOS, but it's not enabled by default, even though we've stressed to VIA it should output to the serial port if a keyboard is not detected. As I said before, '"Good" serial BIOS is a relative term. No PC BIOS based systems have very good serial consoles.'. We have a proposal to create a 64 node cluster using these system boards. FWIW that's my US$.02 diana
