On Monday 08 June 2009 01:17 am, Roger E. Rustad, Jr wrote: > Lemme guess, we're not calling Cisco TAC!?!
Sure, if you're paying <smile>. Cisco's got a great product line, but I neither need nor can afford the offered functionality. Don't forget even when you buy used they generally expect you to pay for the license. > My experience with BSD (OpenBSD and FreeBSD) is that BSD takes a huge > pounding with very little resources and barely cracks a sweat. I agree, and I may yet go with it. but what I'm doing is incredibly simple; see more below. > BSD's ports system is nice, and some would argue, just as good (if > not better) than Linux's package management. I'm one of those who would argue yes, having used various unix and BSD flavors since the 80s. But I'm way far out of the loop these days, and I'm quite experienced with RedHat/CentOS linux <smile> > (Personally, I'm a fan of deb/apt-get). Funny you should say that, I used apt-get for years on Red Hat Linux (yes, it exists) before yum was invented. I switched to yum only so I wouldn't have to depend on others for repositories. > From a functional point of view, what is this router going to do? > Simply NAT? BGP? Firewall? QoS? Actually none of the above. It's going to sit between my upstream and my switch, so I can set up (in the next few weeks, not today, VLANs. Today just subnets. Simple stuff, all done with iptables. Which is one of the reasons I'm going with linux. Saving the learning curve. Having to move was a decision I didn't want to make. Price was a big factor; old provider doubled my price for the contract renewal and if I'm not out by the 14th I trigger an automatic one-year renewal. > Are you moving from something like pf to iptables? I moved off FreeBSD/pf last year, but my vendor built the system and never gave me documentation, and now he's lost the switch password, so we're using a temporary unmanaged switch until I can take the managed switch out of service, and reset it and set it up for vlans again. > Is there something wrong with the drive? Or are you wanting to > change distros so that you can support it easier? Nothing wrong with the drive; the vendor who did all our updates when we used it (until a year ago) can't find the password. It seems losing passwords is epidemic. I'm now keeping a password store; all in one place; when I set up a password I put it there first. Encrypted. And I may very well reinstall FreeBSD at some future point on it (later version?) and put it back into service; the drive on the router can even completely fail and the router will keep on routing... because it's basically just the iptables and the kernel (and an editor I can install on a USB stick) but I like the idea of a router w/o moving parts. (I could even buy a newer one later; this move came upon me very quickly; too late to start everything over from scratch <frown>.) > Honestly, I've had lots of problems with just about every type of > drive, but Maxtors seem to be at the bottom of the rung and Seagates > closer to the top. No matter what the brand, though, if it has an > orange/white sticker that has a new "reduced" price, run the other > way, as it was likely returned to the store by someone else. Yes, I know about those stickers <smile>. I have bought returned product from Frys, but not something like a drive <smile>. I'm using an almost 8 year old Maxtor drive that was pulled out of service about five years ago for no particular reason. I took it from an old Cobalt RaQ4 that was pulled out of service because we switched (then) to RaQ 550s, as I recall. Have had good luck with similar drives, including the one in my current router. DiamondMax X Plus 8. Thanks for the heads-up and info. Jeff -- Jeff Lasman, Nobaloney Internet Services P.O. Box 52200, Riverside, CA 92517 Our jplists address used on lists is for list email only voice: +1 951 643-5345, or see: "http://www.nobaloney.net/contactus.html";
