Re: [PLUG] Router Projects and VPNs

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 9:31 PM, John Kreno <john.kreno@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure if you've looked into Ubiquiti or Mikrotik, but they have some
> hardware that may satisfy your requirements. The hardware is also fairly
> reasonably priced, in the 80-150 dollar range.

The hardware looks quite nice and in the right price range.

How about the software?  Will it do everything I asked about (openvpn
in/out, flexible routing, etc)?  If it involves using the command line
to configure things, will that configuration persist through
updates/etc (I'm sure GUI configs will, but if you're hacking away at
it I suspect all bets are off)?  What is the commitment of these
vendors to software updates (I'm very annoyed that my not-that-old
Buffalo router does not have a firmware update that fixes heartbleed,
which in theory means my WPA2 authentication is vulnerable)?  Or, are
you recommending these with the intention that they be flashed with
some other firmware?

The one advantage of basically building a PC is that I can install a
standard distro which basically gets security updates forever, and
distros already have ways of letting you configure daemons and not
have that blown away on every update.

On the other hand, there is no way that a $100 PC is going to route 1M
packets per second with only a few percent CPU and power use likely
measured in single-digit watts.  I definitely like the concept here -
I just fear the closed source route is going to save me time up-front
and cost me in the long run as consumer hardware manufacturers are
notorious for abandoning their products.

--
Rich
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