Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 09:48:44 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "Bara Zani" <bara_zani@yahoo.com>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: DSL PPPoE with 2 NICs Message-ID: <021c01c16f44$aded3db0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <000a01c16f3f$497965c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
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Ted writes: > You will find as you continue on your career, > Anthony, that if you always base your purchasing > decisions on the cheapest solution at the time, > that you will end up paying for it because your > going to be forever tearing out your existing > inadequate systems and replacing them. I have found in my existing career that the story you tell is misleading. Both companies ultimately spent about the same amount of money on their networking solutions. East Electronics spent more money, actually, because not only did they buy more expensive hardware right up front, but they had to find and pay a far more expensive administrator to run it; people with extensive experience with Cisco routers are far more expensive than people with no experience with Cisco routers. So over the long term, East Electronics spent more money than West Electronics, with identical results. The East Electronics solution probably pleased their geeks, but it was not as cost-effective as the West Electronics solution. > The majority of business in the US operate like > this and when you get into the larger businesses > you would be astounded at the amount of money that > gets thrown down the rathole in failed IT projects. It depends on the company. I've seen it go both ways, in very large companies indeed. > If, however, you look at some of the technological > leaders you will find that they don't operate this way, > instead they will invest more money in a more expensive > solution upfront because they know that over time > the solution is expandable. Being a technological leader and being profitable are two different things. Even in technology companies, they are often distinct. > But, on the other hand, if you ALWAYS do this, your > going to make poor decisions a lot of times. Poor decisions are fine as long as you protect the bottom line. The fact is, there is no significant difference between a Cisco 26xx and a LinkSys router in the big picture. If you buy the former to do the work of the latter, you're throwing money out the window. > But the problem here as others have pointed out > is that you can only know with certainty if this > is the right decision in HINDSIGHT. If it is the wrong decision, you've only lost $100. And that's not much compared to the cost of a fancy Cisco router that you may eventually buy. > If that $100 router has a hole in it and someone > guns you, then this is when your going to learn that > it's necessary to remove it and replace it with a > more elaborate solution later. Cheap doesn't equal insecure. In fact, it is easier to secure a simple, cheap configuration than a complex, expensive configuration, all else being equal. This is why some people mistakenly believe that UNIX is inherently more secure than Windows NT/2000; it isn't, but since it is a simpler configuration, it's easier to secure, provided that you don't have very ambitious goals for using it. > But yours is easier to understand for the feeble= > minded than mine. The feeble-minded are legion in the business world (and even in the computer world, unfortunately). > Well obviously if your Telneted in to a command > prompt you can't run an editor that looks like > Notepad because there is no mouse at your disposal. I rarely use the mouse with Notepad. I did find an editor called "joe" that works pretty well. It behaves as I intuitively expect it to behave, for the most part. > But, you can run the "ee" editor just by typing > "ee" and have a much easier to use editor. I'll try it, although the man page still seems to show a fondness for bizarre escape sequences instead of simple arrow keys. > If all you need to do is change a single byte in > a config file it's a lot easier to use this while > at a shell prompt than to FTP the file over then back. At 100 Mbps, it doesn't seem to make much difference. > It would then probably come to you as a surprise > that when TCP/IP was invented that the only kind > of routers there were were UNIX systems. Since I already knew that, it does not surprise me. When TCP/IP was invented, computers could not be had for less than $50,000-$100,000 or so. That doesn't mean that computers costing $100,000 are needed to run TCP/IP today. > Specialized hardware routers came about later, and > to this day there's still many, many ISP's running > BGP4 on PC's with serial lines coming in to them. If it weren't for specialized hardware routers, the Internet would have ground to a halt long ago. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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