Been reading up on the use of CF cards for web proxying, and I'm intrigued by this possibility.
My questions on the matter would be:
1) Is this setup really reliable? If I have, say 200+ users on a branch site connected to a 100Mbit link, how long will it take before a typical, say, 8GB CF card will choke due to the repeated write cycles? Days, weeks, months, years? We'd only really be happy with the solution if the card ran for at least a year or two before finally cracking under the strain (similar to a HDD for example).
2) What about the speed? We currently use small PCs with a Linux installation for this purpose; these boxes (in addition to being an administrative headache at times) are managing around 20-40Mbps overall. A Routerboard is capable of shunting well over this figure over two ethernet links under normal circumstances; how serious is the bottleneck when running proxy over CF?
3) Is there any major difference with this configuration running with the RB600 vs the RB1000? (In other words, is the processor a serious bottleneck when running the web proxy in conjunction with some light routing/firewalling/NAT/port-forwarding, a bit of H323, a rarely-used management VPN and DNS caching/general networking stuff?