Stompbox Network - Soekris Net 4521 3G Hotspot
My Soekris Net 4521 got here Tuesday and I’ve now had a few days to play with it. I’m quite impressed with quality of the board and it’s perfomance. I’ve got it booting the Stompbox version of Pebble Linux off a 128MB CF card.
It’s equipped with two pc-card slots and one mini-PCI slot. The cpu is an AMD 486 at 133Mhz and it’s loaded with 64MB of RAM. The whole thing runs off of 12-54V DC so it can be powered quite nicely in the car or with most any wall wart you have laying around. One of the PC-Card slots is taken up with my EVDO card (cellular broadband internet). I hope to put a USB adapter in the 2nd slot and put a wifi adapter in the mini-PCI.
I had some issues getting dnscache to listen on port 53 so I tossed it out and installed dnsmasq. I’ve got it routing the local net to the internet over EVDO and just need to find a mini-PCI wifi card with a Prism2 chipset to make it replace my WIFI Access Point.
I’ll post a proper howto sometime in the near future and give some updates on how it performs when we’re camping this weekend.
July 28th, 2006 at 10:50 am
Did you ever get the USB adapter connected and working?
–dio
July 28th, 2006 at 10:55 am
I haven’t gotten the USB adapter yet. It’s on my list of things to do someday but life’s been too busy to make it a priority yet. Probably this fall when things slow down a little and we get back into the camping and travelling mode.
I will also be writing a follow up article on switching to Sprint’s EVDO and setting up bandwidth tracking.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:27 am
I’d be interested in how the Sprint EVDO is playing for you. I’ve got the Verizon KPC650, and the performance is usable. Adjusting the packet size to 2048 has helped a bit.
We’re heading to BlackHat in Las Vegas on 07.29.2006 with the 4521 in the RV. It’s the 1st roadtrip with it acting as the ppp/wifi router.
I picked up an Adaptec dual-port USB cardbus, but I can’t get the right combination of modules to load and recognize it. I’ve got a mouse-like DeLorme USB GPS, but without the USB support, the GPS is useless.
I’ll let you know if I make any headway with the Adaptec card.
–dio
July 29th, 2006 at 10:23 am
BlackHat sounds like fun. Too many things to do this summer to take more than a day off here and there
I’m going to hunt around for a USB adapter soon and see if I can get it working. I’d love to be able to attach a a GPS mouse and webcam to the stompbox. I imagine I’ll have to setup the older compiler and compile my own kernel to support the camera.
Maybe it’s time to get a 1G flash and put a larger more complete distro on it. It sure would be nice to run debian stable or Ubuntu server on it.