On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 02:16:47PM -0500, Ryan Leathers wrote: > In my home network I went through 2 Linksys and 1 Netgear router in > about 18 months. The more complex the filtering and forwarding the less > reliable these things seemed to be. Maybe I just had bad luck. > Offloading some of the complexities to a linux firewall helped a lot, > but in the end my lack of patience was greater than my frugality. > > I finally stepped up and purchased a business class router and its been > worth every penny. Stateful inspection, VPN, IDS and DHCP have all been > rock solid as expected. I still have a linux firewall behind the router > for "security in depth" but I rarely have to tinker with either now that > the router behaves consistently. > > Three cheers for good hardware... and gratz to those of you who've had > better luck with consumer grade routers than I have.
Why not just use a Linux/*BSD box with two NICs for a router/firewall/VPN tunnel? You bring up good points about the consumer grade router - I don't know if I trust it. It's a black box with no debugging. I'd rather use an OSS that let's me control every aspect of operation. The only reason I bought an applicance was that several years ago I had more money than time or experience and lower requirements. Now I have more experience and higher requirements and old Linux boxes just lying about. It seems that the appliance router doesn't bring any value that can't be supplied by the *nix box. Am I missing something? -- Mike Two hundred years ago, we note mischievously, the average American or European had a standard of living not very much superior to that of the average man in India or China. -- dailyreckoning.com -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
