In my opinion proprietary hardware will remain proprietary and you can't do anything about it, you're stuck on it, and whenever there's a bug or exploit on it, you look like a sitting duck waiting to happen something.
Yes we need a pretty handy and easy to maintain appliance, so what I did is to purchase an IWill XP4 SFF (a reasonable size to occupy space) and put my live cd distribution as my firewall/VPN/NAT with sshd for me to tweak/change configuration. And whenever there's an update, recompile the whole thing then burn again on a new cd. Now I have my own firewall appliance. Cheers, -- Jimmy Lim Operation & Support Team Leader Tricom -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
