> > A PC is a hammer, but its such a big hammer...
> A PC is closer to a swiss army knife IMO :)
Grin
> tested it). However there are other reasons to choose a dedicated router over a
> full computer:
>
> 1) Better security: There arn't many things running on a router to go wrong and
> to let people in (although they are not invulnerable).
I question this too: You have inflexible security, code that has not been
audited by a third party and may well contain 'secret' backdoor passwords.
This is _horribly_ common if you look through bugtraq - even with many
well known apparently reliable vendors.
You face arbitary obsolesence. Your vendor can turn around and say "we dont
support that model any more". They can say "tech support is now on a 1-900
number". They can say "your Y2K upgrade wont be free".
> 2) Better reliabilty: Routers have no hard drives AFAIK or other PC
> components that could unexpectedly fail. If it does acutally fail, just unplug
> it and replace it. PCs tend to need long configuration phases.
PC's have the flexibility to make it easy to handle faults, detect them and
route around them. They do have lower reliability in the general case. For
a router you must hold a spare of the exact model and type of each router
you use, for a PC a couple of large boxes with everything handy preloaded
for swapping out routers, web servers etc work
> 3) Smaller: when you have 6-7 servers in a room, you are really happy for small
> devices, and if routers are anything like switches in size, they are much
> smaller than any computer.
PC's come in 1U ad 2U form. This tends to be a desktop issue only.
> 4) Lots of pretty lights (not sure if routers have them though): Pretty lights
> send people into trances, great for bosses :).
MRTG makes managers so happy, even if you are really only charting the coffee
temperature on the web graphs.
> Of course, all of my arguements are probably bogus or can be worked around.
You missed one actually - for non computer literate customers a sealed unit
router is harder to take apart or break and less interesting to fiddle with
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