[ Please accept the Editor's apologies for this break from sunsets and oceans to run a good old fashioned nerd story ]
So yeah, when the (4 years old, 1 year out of warranty, natch) laptop hard disk in the Soekris failed, my first concern was what the heck to do with the still-somewhat-valuable-and-useful Soekris. Then, I realized it could be a solid-state disk for an Atari 8-bit computer, even though it's over 250 times faster than the computer it's serving. Minor details.
Above, Atari 130XE and Soekris net4801 connected with SIO2PC cable
Turns out, it wasn't that hard to pull off. I started by loading Pyramid Linux onto a 128-meg CompactFlash card. Then I edited /etc/inittab to stop getty on the serial console (and everything else that was respawning). Then, installed sio2linux (built from another linux 2.6 x86 computer elsewhere), along with a 16-megabyte .ATR hard disk image that I've been using for a few years now. I added sio2linux to an /etc/rc2.d init script, and to be fancy, added net48xx-led to /etc/modules.conf, and at the bottom of my init script,
# turn on error led to indicate ready state
echo 1 > /sys/class/leds/net48xx\:error/brightness
So that the red LED on the front panel of the Soekris comes on to indicate that the machine is up and sio2linux is running. At this time, I boot the Atari 130XE, and it boots up and sees the Soekris exactly as a 16-megabyte hard drive, with only standard-speed (19200bps) SIO support.
Lest we call the solution (266Mhz computer with a multitasking kernel that you can ssh into over the network just to serve Atari 8-bit SIO requests) inelegant, it bears noting that at least it only draws about 8 watts of power. But it's still inelegant.
An upside to this is that sio2linux is open-source, and it wouldn't take but a weekend or so to add modem port telnet emulation or turbo-speed SIO to it, which would really make this solution more interesting. Another time.
-Chris