[debian-non-standard] Some questions about Debian on Asus WL-500g Premium

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello!

I read your article about Debian on Asus WL-500g Deluxe and I found it 
quite interesting[1]. I would like to run pure Debian as my ADSL router 
to have that well known very good package management, be able to upgrade 
and stuff. And I expect that routers will only get more flash and more 
memory in the future...

This is of course also directed to other members of this mailinglist. So 
if you have some experience I am glad to hear them. ;-)

I currently borrowed a VIA 1GHz Esther industrial PC from the company I 
work for, but it gets a bit hot and I think its a bit oversized for what 
I want to use it for. 

From what I read the Asus WL-500g Premium would be a good choice, but I am 
wondering a bit about the memory footprint of Debian on it. On the VIA 
machine with iptables, pppoe, openntpd, of course SSH and more getty's 
than I would need on the Asus (or even on the VIA;) it requires about 
10-12 MB which seems quite comfortable for me. I use Bazaar to have some 
revision control and wonder whether it might work on the Asus as well. I 
think it should work within 32 MB on VIA, considering the above memory 
footprint, but I do not know whether it might take more RAM on a MIPS 
architecture. Hmmm, I tested it on the VIA and it had upto 35 MB memory 
usage laut vmstat 1 on some basic operations. Could be a bit tough. Well 
but it has 14.5 MB cached at that time too.


1) What do you run on your Asus with Debian?

2) Did you enable the additional 16 MB? Is it difficult to do? Seems to 
require a few commands only, but they have to be entered at some boot 
prompt I am not sure how to reach. Via serial? Do I have to use some 
soldering to use the serial console or is a cable for that available? I 
would like to avoid hardware hacks as I am not that skilled in that. I 
feel comfortable with opening the box, but I do not like to do some 
soldering if it can be avoided, although that 128 MB memory hacks sounds 
interesting ;-).

3) How is the memory footprint on your Asus router? Does what you run all 
fit into 32 MB or do you use swap regularily? I do not like it to use 
swap on usual operation. If it uses a bit of swap during bzr add and bzr 
commit I think that would be okay.

4) Is it possible to disable WLAN so that it doesn't send anymore?

5) Did you measurement how much power it uses? Does it get quite hot?

5) What are your other experiences with that router?

6) Just curious: Did you try software raid 1 with two USB sticks? ;-)

Ciao,
-- 
Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de
GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA  B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7
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