[GRLUG] Sarge on the WGT634U

[Tim Schmidt]

On 6/29/06, Jordan Hudson <jodanlime at gmail.com> wrote:
> well thats stinkin awesome ;)

It's pretty decent.  I've had some time to work with it now, and with
a fairly minimal, but fully functional setup, I'm using ~140Mb of disk
space on a 256Mb stick.  That's with the base debian install -nano,
fdutils +vim, dnsmasq, wondershaper, vlan, dropbear.

Oh yeah, and top reports ~20Mb of 29Mb used, but 13Mb of that is
cached files...  so of the 32Mb of ram these beasts have, 3Mb is used
by the kernel, ~5Mb used by program data, ~2Mb used by buffers (i/o,
network, etc?), and ~13Mb cached crap...  so only about 10Mb is
actually being used.  I've got a 32Mb swap partition on the same flash
disk and free is reporting only 4k used after a couple days of uptime,
so it's managed to swap out exactly one page.  It'll be interesting to
see what happens when I fire up privoxy and moblock, but for your
run-o-the-mill routing duties, this thing looks downright roomy.  Just
a little suprising from a modern distribution without the help of
uClibc, busybox, or the like.

As far as the feel of it goes...  establishing SSH connections (eith
either dropbear or openssh) is just a little sluggish - they're really
responsive once established, it's the cryptographically-intense stuff
that takes a while, which would make sense seing as it doesn't have an
FPU.  Apt is really responsive, it boots quickly, BASH works well.
Perl stuff takes a little while to run.  Strangely, mounting NFS
volumes takes about a full minute - may be some network configuration
weirdness...

So overall, you can tell the machine isn't a speed demon, but if you
stick to the CLI (who in their right mind would attempt X - headless
or not - on this thing?), it's perfectly responsive and a very usable
machine.  I can't say I'd want to run a LAMP stack on it, but the
lighter web servers should feel right at home.

--tim