My query certainly touched off quite a long thread on this topic. To summarize; nobody really had a solution that met all of my criteria which is what I suspected might be the case.
Most people recommend a variation of "roll-your-own" but that has some significant down-sides when installing equipment at client sites. The two major drawbacks are: 1) We have a significant number of techs that do support. Naturally most of them do Windows support and though they are very good at what the do; they aren't about to ssh into a Linux box and start issuing iptables commands at a the command line (though I realize that isn't required for things like IPCop in most cases). 2) The major show stopper for "roll-you-own" is it doesn't meet the $200 price cap. If you are talking about something like IPCop, then you either putting on PC hardware, or even a sokeris box. Either way you are substantially over $200 and that's not even taking into consideration the time required to do the build which is substantial. Yes I'm aware you could do a lot to streamline this but that's missing the point. What you want is for any tech or sales person in the organization to be able to recommend a solution to a client and then place an order, take it to the client site and have it installed. If you have to do an intermediate step of "building" the solution then you've massively increased your upfront time/cost. It would seem the closest answer is the WRT54G with linux firmware. Even though it is still a variation of "roll-your-own" the hardware is dirt cheap and the flash process takes only a few seconds and any tech can do it once shown how. And after installation any tech (or even end-users in some cases) can maintain it since it has a nice Web interface. Not a perfect solution but the best so far. I thank everyone for their feedback on this issue. It was quite informative. John --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
