Review: Soekris Net5501

Archived in the category: VoIP Hardware
Posted by jshay on 01 Sep 08 -

I’ve been tinkering with the Soekris net5501 for several months now. In fact I’ve been playing with several different embedded designs (Digium AA50 and Routerboard 532A to name a few) with several different Linux and Asterisk combinations.

Things I don’t like about it:

  • The enclosure it came in. This thing is a god awful off-green/blue/turquoise/whatever color. It’s clear engineers have no taste in color. The picture doesn’t show the color but trust me it’s not good looking

Soekris net5501-front

  • Again, the case. It’s difficult to open and close

Sokeris net5501-lid open

  • Wish there were a knock-out for a wifi antenna mount

Things I like about it:

  • It’s being widely supported by Astlinux and Askozia
  • Small foot print so it can be placed anywhere
  • Low power consumption
  • The 3.3v PCI slot makes it useful for analog and digital interface cards for SOHO environments
  • support of a SATA drive (I bought a 4 gig Solid State Drive instead)

General:

Currently I am running Askozia peering with my SIP account at Vitelity. No real complaints about the device itself which would keep me from using it in other small applications.

My only complaint, and it’s not even a problem with the hardware, are the Linux/Asterisk combo applications available for it and their lack of particular features.

Askozia has come a long way and is using Runnix which makes deploying and upgrading easier. However it’s missing the ability to create custom voicemail boxes which reside on the devices storage. Currently it’s all sent to a single email box. Really annoying for a mutli-user setup.

AstLinux has also come a long way and is nearing a 0.6 release. However it’s GUI looks like it was designed using FrontPage. Sorry guys. I understand it’s still in development and more to the point I think they are aiming a a streamlined interface as opposed to the AsteriskGUI. Personally I love the AsteriskGUI and I’d love to see a developer split off the code and offer two different interface options - one simple and one advanced.

Again, I had no real issues with the hardware. If I were real ambitous I could install Debian or some other distro on it and do a full blown Asterisk install including AsteriskGUI but for my small setup this works just fine.

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