[Soekris] Using a 5501 as an NFS server

[Ralph Becker-Szendy]

Has anyone done some serious testing of using a 5501 as an NFS server,
obviously of moderate performance (the interfaces are obviously limited
to 10 MByte/s), but of largish capacity?

I ran a tiny little test a few days ago, configuring the OpenBSD on my
5501 as a NFS server (no tuning whatsoever), using a 5.4K laptop disk
and the OpenBSD FFS with soft updates, and with a Linux NFS 2/3 client,
and it worked fine, with a read bandwidth (large files, large IOs) of
9 MByte/s (the file was probably in cache on the server already), and
a write bandwidth of only 3 MByte/s.  The limit doesn't seem to be CPU
utilization, so most likely performance tuning (including suitable use
of asynchronous writes) could bring the write bandwidth to near the
10 MByte/s limit too.

I was thinking of putting a 750 GB or even 1 TB SATA disk on my 5501
(replacing the current small laptop disk), and use it as a file server
for data that has to be available 24x7, but doesn't require great band-
width.  Since the Soekris already has to be powered up 24x7 (it is
the router, firewall, AP, and server for all network-related services),
adding slow NFS to it seems like a reasonable idea.

Anyone see any problem with that?  Is there a problem with attaching
really large SATA disks to the 5501?

-- 
Ralph Becker-Szendy    ralph at lr.los-gatos.ca.us            (408)395-1435
735 Sunset Ridge Road; Los Gatos, CA 95033