![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
This entry is public on DW (but not on LJ). I normally don't post publicly, but I think that's a bad habit, so we'll see how this goes.
I have had some kind of mild non-specific illness for what seems like all month. It is annoying.
Thanks to magic of VoIP, it's now cheaper for me to call the US or Germany than it is to make domestic UK calls. I have no idea why this should be so, but I assume it's due to insane termination charges from BT.
Since Fast Ethernet only needs 2 pairs out of a 4-pair cat5 cable, there's no reason not to run two Ethernet connections over a single cable (as illustrated). I knew this before, but for some reason I never thought to actually do it until now. This is much easier than running two separate cables down the hallway.
So, I've recently acquired an ALIX.2d3 single-board computer, for use as an ADSL router and VoIP PBX. It's not especially fast -- 500MHz Geode CPU and 256MB RAM -- but I think it should be enough for what I want.
I put a 4GB CompactFlash card in it, and installed NetBSD. When idle, with /var/log and /tmp mounted as MFS (memory) filesystems, the system seems to do about 1 disk write every 30 seconds (maybe the syncer?); other writes should be fairly minimal (mostly voicemail), so I think the CF card should last a while. If that turns out not to be the case, it also has a 44-pin IDE header, but I'm not sure if there's room in the case to mount an IDE disk.
NetBSD seems to run quite well on it: the only problem was that after disconnecting then reconnecting the Ethernet cable, no traffic would pass until the interface was manually reset (ifconfig down/up). Forcing the media type to 100BASE-TX seemed to fix this.
So far, it seems to work fine as a PBX, but I haven't tried it as a router yet; I'm waiting for DrayTek to fix this ADSL modem (Vigor 120) to work with the somewhat non-standard PPPoE setup my ISP uses. (It might be that the ISP switches to PPPoA before it's fixed, since DrayTek seem to be quite slow at actually doing anything with support requests.)
I have had some kind of mild non-specific illness for what seems like all month. It is annoying.
Thanks to magic of VoIP, it's now cheaper for me to call the US or Germany than it is to make domestic UK calls. I have no idea why this should be so, but I assume it's due to insane termination charges from BT.
Since Fast Ethernet only needs 2 pairs out of a 4-pair cat5 cable, there's no reason not to run two Ethernet connections over a single cable (as illustrated). I knew this before, but for some reason I never thought to actually do it until now. This is much easier than running two separate cables down the hallway.So, I've recently acquired an ALIX.2d3 single-board computer, for use as an ADSL router and VoIP PBX. It's not especially fast -- 500MHz Geode CPU and 256MB RAM -- but I think it should be enough for what I want.
I put a 4GB CompactFlash card in it, and installed NetBSD. When idle, with /var/log and /tmp mounted as MFS (memory) filesystems, the system seems to do about 1 disk write every 30 seconds (maybe the syncer?); other writes should be fairly minimal (mostly voicemail), so I think the CF card should last a while. If that turns out not to be the case, it also has a 44-pin IDE header, but I'm not sure if there's room in the case to mount an IDE disk.
NetBSD seems to run quite well on it: the only problem was that after disconnecting then reconnecting the Ethernet cable, no traffic would pass until the interface was manually reset (ifconfig down/up). Forcing the media type to 100BASE-TX seemed to fix this.
So far, it seems to work fine as a PBX, but I haven't tried it as a router yet; I'm waiting for DrayTek to fix this ADSL modem (Vigor 120) to work with the somewhat non-standard PPPoE setup my ISP uses. (It might be that the ISP switches to PPPoA before it's fixed, since DrayTek seem to be quite slow at actually doing anything with support requests.)