[Soekris] Add-on NICs for Soekris, survivability

[Stuart Henderson]

On 2008-05-19, farlies <farlies at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I will try a supported NIC on the pci port of the soekris box and use
>>  that for connection to the XP box.
>
> Since the topic has been broached, we're also looking for an
> NIC that will work in 4801/5501.  Some of our machines face
> a "hostile" network--one that has seen various DoS attacks
> (arp flood etc.) We've observed systems lock up under attack, becoming
> useless until power cycled.  We'd like to select a NIC/driver/OS that
> would hold up as well as possible.  Does anyone have any experience
> suggesting some brand/model (100Mb) is more robust under these
> conditions?

You don't mention many details. Speed of internet connection? How many
packets-per-second of DoS? You might well need a more powerful CPU
than the Geode to cope with attack conditions... You might actually
find the 4801 does better than 5501 if you use an OS that enables
interrupt holdoff.

Using the hardware watchdog timer might at least get the machine
rebooted automatically when it hangs btw.