I was just wondering, what is the difference between having a LEAF box and just going out and buying a hardware router for fifty bucks.
This question is harder to answer than it used to be because, honestly, the cheap routers have gotten better. Once, they weren't very cheap or very versatile; now they are better on both scores.
Still, LEAF has some advantages in all but the very simplest of settings, and sometimes even in them.
One big advantage is greater flexibility, permitting their use on more different situations. The cheap routers support a single LAN; LEAF routers can support a true DMZ and other complicated physical setups. The cheap routers are NAT'ing routers; LEAF routers can do regular as well as NAT'd routing. iptables (Shorewall, usually) provides a greater degree of control over firewalling. Multiple VPN options exist. The router itself can run more services, such as DNS. I don't think the cheap routers can do proxy ARP. And so on.
The other big advantage derives from all the software involved being Open Source. Rather than argue this in the abstract, let me point to a recent counterexample: Belkin recently modified its router firmware so it automatically redirects a random http request, once every 8 hours or so, to Belkin's Website to promote its Parental Control Service. Read about the details here --
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/07/1740205&tid=153 http://www.marco.org/content/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36
Now my guess is that this bit of inventiveness won't survive the negative press it's getting ... but it does illustate the vulnerabilites users have when they surrender control over the software that connects them to the Internet.
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