Topic: Router Board opinions

I am interested in getting a device for a WIDS system.  I'm not sure which device to lean towards, I know I could purchase a Asus WL-500g but thought I would go a little geekier and get some type of router board or soekris.  I have had some brief experience with some Soekris devices but never for anything besides 802.3 stuff.  There was mention of the Router Board, ALix and Router Station on the mailing list.  The ALIX3d2 (http://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm) looks pretty nice and I believe will suit my needs.  Does anyone have any experience using these boards?  Is something like RouterBoard's 680MHz (http://routerboard.com/comparison.html)overkill for a WIDS device?  I would think the wireless card off-loads most of the packet analysis and rebuilding to the mobo so it should help but I could be wrong and 300MHz is enough for most environments.

My thoughts so far are to get a board that has at least 1 USB (2 sounds nice but not sure if I would need 2 and what scenario would cause me to need more than one).  I would also like at least 2 minipci slots, I'm thinking two wireless cards - 1 hopping and 1 on the channel of its closest AP.  I am not sure if I need more than 1 ethernet, since I am guessing I would use this for mainly only remote management access and possibly logging.

Does anyone have any recommendations on a minipci cards, antennas and enclosures?
Anyone with opinions between Alix, Soekris, Router Board for something like a WIDS device?

Thanks,
Nick

Re: Router Board opinions

In case anyone is interested a month or so ago I ended up purchasing a Alix 2d2 and an Atheros MP 5004 4G 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card and an 8GB CF Card.  I am not an expert with messing with this stuff but I got it working "nicely" and it seems to do the job so far.  I am most familiar with Gentoo, so I stuck with Gentoo and got it installed with what I think is a pretty light weight footprint.
After it was all said and done, Gentoo took up about 355MB and is using up about 35MB of RAM.  I am sure if I used a stage1 and did some more streamlining I would be able to get a little more bang for my buck but this approach worked for me and I am not sweating the 355MB.

Basically, I built the environment on a directory on my laptop.  Chrooted into it, compiled all the needed system apps within the directory, then mounted the CF card, bound the CF card and the build dir together and copied over only the necessary pre-compiled binaries, setup Grub and then moved on to specific apps and started working on the wireless side.  Currently, I have it setup as a drone with Kismet NewCore (pre-RC1) and I am oinking around with OSSEC on the Kismet server to watch the .alert logs and notify me of events.

I'm sure I messed up a few things and I am sure there are tons of better ways to get it configured and built, so if anyone has any pointers or suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.  I posted my install instructions here - http://theinterw3bs.com/wiki/index.php? … _a_CF_Card

Thanks,
Nick

Last edited by Kvetch (2009-06-04 01:02:54)

Re: Router Board opinions

Hi, I am looking at something similar so I will let you know how I also get on.

Thanks.

Andrew..