[conspire] Quiet, Freedom-compatible NAT/firewall/misc box?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> I'm thinking of a raspberry pi 2 for such an application. Not 100% freedom
> but the proprietary stuff is in the video. 

The other disturbing software bit (for Raspberry Pi 2 Model B), as I
mentioned separately, is the ongoing kernel situation.  You're probably
thinking 'At last, a Pi that I can run the standard Debian armhf ('HF' =
hardfloat) port on.'  Well, kinda, almost.

With the standard packaged Pi distros, you'll get kernel 3.18, but it's
not the standard kernel by a long stretch.  An experimenter reported
that he had to apply 'stack of patches on top from the raspberrypi
github repository' to the corresponding Debian packaged kernel, and then
further tweak the result a bit.  Plus some other non-kernel changes.
Details here:
http://sjoerd.luon.net/posts/2015/02/debian-jessie-on-rpi2/

Me, I'd just not be entirely happy with being on hardware the mainline
Linux kernels doesn't know how to support, that requires a whole bunch
of out-of-tree patches all the time.  (It seems that _all_ ARM boards
involve this drawback.)

> USB Ethernet for the second port might be a deal killer but I've had
> pretty good luck with them. 

Dodgy technology and also CPU-intensive on a machine that doesn't have a
lot of grunt to spare.

But the biggest single omission in the I/O department is SATA.  Having
nothing better than a Micro SD port and USB2 is this unit's chief
and most egregious hardware limitation.  The 1GB RAM is understandable,
but the lack of even mSATA is puzzling and means you are permanently
stuck with only crappy mass-storage connectivity.

> And cheap and highly replaceable.

That's the good news.

I don't think it's adequate for a router, but standard differ.