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

[Michael B. Trausch]

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