[Soekris] Sizing a Soekris

[RB]

> Like so many other messages I've seen in the archives, I am
> looking to replace a loud, power-hungry old desktop PC that
As with most of the answers provided, it's not as much about which
apps you want to run, rather more about concurrency and volume.  You
may find that serving X zones with BIND only allows you to run N IPsec
tunnels before getting OOM conditions.

That said, I'm unsure of FreeBSD's precise memory requirements - I'm
sure many people run it on the 45xx, and given the anecdotal
publications I've found I'd expect the minimum to be 20-32MB.  I do
know one firewall distro based on FBSD (pfSense) no longer fits in the
max memory of a 45xx, and its more minimalist parent (m0n0wall) was
struggling to stay there last I checked.  IMHO, FreeBSD seems an
awfully arbitrary requirement, particularly in the embedded world
where OpenBSD, NetBSD, and even some of the minimal Linux distros tend
to rule.

You may also want to consider that the 45xx series is years out of
production and any you get will likely be used.