On Wednesday, July 17, 2013 12:08:39 Alan Jachimiak wrote: > Super input! > > Since nobody is showin' the love for Microtik, I just pulled the trigger on > the $20 D-Link Dir 615. I will install dd-wrt on it and have a go. > > For the rest of the functionality it Looks like I'm going to need something > a bit more powerful. I have two NIC's on my main server at home which is > a virtualization platform. I'll make a new VM with two NIC's and then > install a router-like OS on it that will give me some of the functionality > I'm looking for. And since each is already a linux distro, I could crawl > in there and do what I want if it hasn't been done already. > > I've looked at > ClearOS<http://www.clearfoundation.com/Software/downloads.html>and > Untangled <http://www.untangle.com/store/get-untangle/>. Both look nice, > but a brief bout of research shows that untangled has more functionality > out of the box. > > FYI ClearOS seems to be built on top of CentOS and Untangled built on top > of Debian ("Lenny"). If you've had experience with either of these, I'd > love to hear about it.
I've tried "Untangled" and found it to be a tangled mess. First, last I looked at it, it's based on a version of Debian that's out of support, meaning the base OS doesn't get security updates. Their Debian repositories are password protected, but IIRC the password for getting in can be seen by examining the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ after installation. When you look into their repositories it looks like there was some work put towards updating the OS to a newer version of Debian, but was halted. AFAICT there's no good reason to run Untangled because you can get all of the free stuff by running Debian (which is more up to date), and everything else seems to require a pricy monthly fee. Also, Untangled _requires_ being installed on a hard disk, and cannot be run on a CF card -- the installation is 20 GB minimum, and the installation is automated which wipes the entire disk and gives you no options to partition the disk manually, even though Debian does. Go ahead and try it for yourself to see, but I make you a bet you come to the same conclusion that I did -- that there's not much to like in Untangled. If you install it into a VM (which is how I tested it), make sure the VM has _two_ NIC devices, otherwise Untangled will refuse to install. I haven't yet tried ClearOS -- this is the first I've heard of it. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [email protected] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College Aug 7 - Scripting Your World with Python Sep 4 - NoSQL and MongoDB Oct 2 - OpenFlow: Open Standard for Networking Hardware
