On Sat, 23 May 2009, Bill Campbell wrote:
> On Sat, May 23, 2009, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Bill Campbell wrote:
>>> Any comments on CentOS 5 on Intel Atom CPUs?
>>>
>>> I need to build a couple of inexpensive systems that will be used
>>> primarily as gateway/firewall systems with OpenVPN, and need
>>> recommendations in reliable hardware platforms. These will need
>>> two NICs.
>>
>> I haven't tried it, but I thought you could run openvpn on many of the
>> small routers like the Linksys WRT54G that allow re-flashing with
>> replacement firmware. They are probably more reliable than anything
>> with a disk.
>
> I haven't tried the WRT54Gs, but have used quite a few BEFVP41
> LinkSys VPN boxes. I would not call them particularly reliable,
> as we have had most fail within 2 years.
I have about 10 wrt54g's distributed at friends and family and haven't had
a single failure in about 5 years time. One of them was reported to be
broken and was put a few months outside as garbage when I recovered it
from my nephew, reflashed and it is still working fine.
The syslinux firmware is not as good as dd-wrt (which I prefer) and
openwrt. But the fact that you can replace them easily, and backup and
restore the configuration makes them perfect black boxes with little
maintenance required.
I have 2 spare wrt54g's that I used for updating the firmware. Keep the
old one and restore the config on a new one, swap and leave the old one
for a week or two that when in case of a firmware problem, you can just
swap the old one again. This technique was useful once with a buggy dd-wrt
release. The other wrt54g I use for conferences :)
And you can't beat the price. I don't know how well it can handle 5
parallel openvpn connections though, so you might want to look into that
first.
--
-- dag wieers, dag@xxxxxxxxxx, http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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