Good thread. I have worked with several solutions in the past. Using a
486, I ran Coyote for about a year. Cool distro, runs off of a floppy. I
also took out the HD and the fan for a more quiet operation. Then you can
telnet into it (or SSH) to manage from with in the LAN. Not much use for it
when it comes to more complex stuff. Mimimal support for VPN. The guy that
turned out Coyote is now working on "Wolverine". More robust, but requires
better hardware. Minimum of Pentium with HD or bootable CD ROM (to load in
to RAM).
Linksys products are good for home networks. Allows for some
portforwarding, MAC spoofing (for those annoying DOCIS compliant modems that
RR turns out), limited VPN and DMZ stuff (along with some of the other
things mentioned). I would suggest that, if you have not already committed
to a wireless router/access point, keep your products seperate. The routers
and wireless access points have been changing so much in the market, that
one other other becomes obsolete with in a year.... they still work fine,
but new products are constantly getting marketed so quickly, that the
hardware is rapidly become "old stuff". Wireless security has grown by
leaps and bounds. My main concern with it now is bandwidth. I don't want a
neighbor "leaching" off of my bandwidth, when I download my 500meg files.
I would love to get a wireless access point, but don't want to drop that
initial investment for the one with the decent encription... and 72meg
speed, along with NICs on 6-8 computers.
I did alot of research on what exactly I wanted, about 2 years ago, and
ended up with a $70 Actron router... not that I highly recommend it, but has
some cool subneting, DMZ features. I might play around with the "Wolverine"
router next, just to get more familiar with the command line features that
it has. If you have a little money to play with... look for a Cisco PIX
501. These have lots of features, DMZ, port forwarding, robust VPN, IDS
(intrusion detection), "stateful packet filtering" (let's you "wade" through
you logs). You can get one off of E-bay, sometimes, for about $340... they
run new at about $450. I use one at work (a PIX 515). We use this for a
LAN with about 100 user and have an internet presense with about 6 servers
on our DMZ (one at work cost a bit more... $6000). The PIX 515 and the 501
have pretty much all of the same abilities, with the exception of the number
of clients and the 501 does not have any "fail over" features.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matt" <matthew@textbox.net>
To: "SLUG" <slug@nks.net>
Sent: Sunday, November 10, 2002 7:04 PM
Subject: Re: [SLUG] Cable/DSL routers
> well there's WEP, not using DHCP, MAC binding, etc - WiFi is not all
> that bad, even if most leave their WAP wide open.
>
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