Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 01:07:45 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com>, "Bara Zani" <bara_zani@yahoo.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: DSL PPPoE with 2 NICs Message-ID: <002501c16e7e$27a453e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <001d01c16e0a$368e5370$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Anthony >Atkielski >Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2001 11:18 AM >To: Bara Zani; freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: DSL PPPoE with 2 NICs > >In a business and production environment, buying the router is generally a >better idea. > Wrong. Generally, businesses seldom make decisions on what is the "better idea". Generally, businesses make decisions based on that is the "cheaper idea" There's a big difference. There are certainly more times that it's cheaper for a business to buy a hardware router than using a PC with 2 NICS. But this is because businesses have to make tradeoffs all the time, and a very common tradeoff is giving up functionality for a cheaper cost. If the functionality that is given up is not essential to the operation of the business then most businesses have a fudiciary duty to their stockholders to go with the cheaper solution that has less features. However, this kind of short term thinking sometimes will turn around and bite the business on the butt and cost it more in the long run, because they have to scrap the solution they bought 6 months ago and replace it with a more expensive solution that has the features that they suddenly found out they needed to have. Thus, even to make the statement that "generally it's cheaper to buy a hardware router" is fraught with peril because businesses cannot make good decisions on generalities, they must examine their own infrastructure and make decisions accordingly. The PROPER statement here is this: "In general, more businesses that have examined their networking infrastructure have concluded that it is cheaper FOR THEM to buy a hardware router, but as each business is different, this statement is only of value to people interested in selling routing products, you must examine your own networking infrastructure to determine if a hardware router is cheaper for your business" Of course, such a statement requires the network admin to use their brains and do some work thinking. As most people these days seem too lazy to want to do that, they are not going to like my statement, but instead they will prefer yours because they want to believe that the world's problems can all be solved in 60-second sound bites. > >I transfer text files to my Windows machine and edit them with Notepad. It's >faster and easier than vi. vi is just too much of a blast to the past (circa >1970) to be more than a curiosity, in my view. > You need to explore other editors under FreeBSD, most of them are much easier to use than vi. >It's hard to find any source that recommends a UNIX system as a >gateway/router >over a dedicated hardware solution, from a security standpoint. >There are just >too many potential holes. Wrong again. The reason the security people are concerned about using UNIX, or Windows, or any general purpose computer operating system as a router is not because of potential holes. It's because IF the router is compromised, you can do a lot more damage to the rest of the network from it than from a dumb hardware router. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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