The insides of a Juniper SSG5 Wireless
I recently was handed a Juniper SSG 5 Wireless unit for a hardware evaluation. Ha ha ha, you want to give me hardware? Don't you know I have screwdrivers...? But I'm rambling... Anyway, this is a sweet little unit except for one little gotcha, the fan is awfully noisy.
Popping open the case shows the two antenna leads coming off the wireless daughter board with two heat sinks. The fan starts up when the unit gets warm inside, but I was surprised because it's really noisy and the temperature threshold is set so low it almost never goes off. Admittedly this device is typically used in small offices, and probably stuck in a closet somewhere, but if you used it in a home office you'd notice that noise quickly.
The Juniper OS is super easy to set up, I turned it into a WPA-PSK AP in about 2 minutes and was surfing the web from a laptop shortly after that.
Things I liked about the SSG 5:
- Easy to configure with the built in web wizard
- Has a complete CLI and can be easily configured over SSH
- The 7 Ethernet interfaces can be configured into any zone. You can easily do failover on 2 WAN ports.
Things I didn't like about the SSG 5:
- The fan noise. It would be nice to see Juniper use a lower RPM fan or try to baffle the sound.
I had to do the wireless testing for my current project at home as the Cisco lightweight AP's in the office have the active security features enabled that try to nuke rogue AP's, and the IT guys refused to whitelist my test kit. Oh well. Too bad I'll have to give the hardware back though... :-)
Other misc. notes:
The 6.3 version of the OS takes about 2 minutes to boot and initialize the DHCP server.
Bootnote:
And finally, the mobo is made by HAINAN HO.... somehow this just had me cracking up when I popped the case open. It's for real, check out the lower right of the mainboard in the picture below.
Search
