Hi John,
One small concern about that little Linksys box is the limited number of
sessions it can handle. I used to put Linux firmware into WRT54G and it
just worked fine until thounsands of concurrent sessions happened. It
just became irresponsive and I had to reboot it. I tried fine tune the
kernel parameters but could not get it fixed. Then I turned to general
Intel platform with obviously more memory and this did the trick.
As for the massive deployment with little linux knowledge involved, I've
also tried to make my own little CD distro which can boot up and read
config just from floppy disk. This works well because you can make
configuration and make massive duplication in central place. Then you
just need to have people turned on the box with CD and floppy and you
have your firewall up right away. This is also good for you to tighten
the security process.
My little 2cents and thank you for initiate this great topic :-)
--
John Jun Li
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John Lange wrote:
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
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