[ale] Networking (was: Re: OT: Slow response)

[Greg Clifton]

Mike,

Have you looked at Vyatta? I haven't installed it yet, and it may be
overkill for what you are talking about, but BJ(?) gave a talk about it at
Wolf's install fest before last and it looked pretty cool.

GC

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:29 PM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 14:31 -0400, Scott Castaline wrote:
> > That's pretty much where I'm going on this matter. The feedback from
> > this thread is making me remember other things happening that I sort
> > of ignored that had increased in frequency in recent times. When I add
> > them up it makes more sense to me. Time to upgrade. Anyone know who
> > makes the ASUS routers? I've seen one that was recommended on the
> > DD-WRT forum (or there about) and it looks like I think Trendnet, not
> > sure.
>
> All I can say for sure is that I rather like Linksys^WCisco
> consumer-class hardware, when I have to use an appliance for routing at
> all.  I will still defer advanced functionality to a "real" computer
> elsewhere on the network... which usually means that I disable DHCP on
> whatever router I have and have my server do DHCP and serve the custom
> parameters that I want for my network.
>
> That said, I have been thinking a lot lately.  A lot of the work that I
> do is the same stuff over and over again---setting up domains with email
> and NAT routing and DHCP and all that jazz.  Sometimes there is one of
> these consumer class NAT routers on the network, and sometimes I roll my
> own and firewall it with iptables and manage it on a dedicated or
> semi-dedicated system, depending on hardware availability and so forth.
> And I'll note that this line of thinking is perhaps dangerous for me,
> because I make my livelihood doing the "same shit, different day" song
> and dance, but...
>
> I have been thinking that there needs to be a distribution that
> abstracts this whole process a bit.  Geared towards (very) small
> businesses, like home businesses and offices < 20 people, where there is
> a program that will handle the configuration of the network interfaces
> and provide for things like failing over from one Internet connection to
> another when the primary route falls asleep, file and printer sharing,
> network setup and management (think DHCP, radvd, DNS, tftp and other
> things that are commonly used to do semicomplicated things on small
> networks, all more or less automagically handled).  Perhaps I'm
> dreaming, or maybe it's the heat and dehydration getting to me and doing
> the talking, but I think that something that did that and did it such
> that a semi-technical person (I think they're called "power users" in
> the Windows world) would be able to set it up and run with it and just
> call a tech when something breaks...
>
>        --- Mike
>
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