[TriLUG] LAN/WAN interface question

[Mike M]

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