Linux World / Network World 2006

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 01:52:14PM -0400, Colin McGregor wrote:
> While an argument can be made for keeping things
> consistant, I prefer a varied enviroment for several
> reasons. In the case of Coyote, it will run happily
> off a single floppy, dispensing with the bother (and
> potential for failure) of a hard drive.

Well if ti does what you want it to do and never needs to be touched,
then it works great.  I tend to expect more from my firewall router,
such as sometimes a web server or such, so I run a full PC for the job.

> In my office enviroment I am currently dealing with a
> mix of Windows (ugh!), FreeBSD boxes and an old RedHat
> box. I don't know what I will run into at the next
> workplace (some place I hope to move to soon, if
> anyone is looking for a system admin. (or knows of
> someone looking) e-mail me)), but I do know that for
> learning purposes I DON'T want everything the same at
> home.

I have run many distributions over the years.  I have learned something
from all of them.  Sometimes only how things ought not be done, but
usually also something useful.  It is much easier to admin 50 boxes if
they all run debian than if I had to deal with a mix of machines.  Makes
fixing security problems if any are found much simpler because you only
have to do one thing to all the machines rather than a different thing
to each box.

> I was NOT thrilled with the way Red Hat transitioned
> to Fedora Core (not that I can totaly blame Red Hat, I
> gather they were loosing money on the likes of RedHat
> 9, and hey they have to make enough to eat...). I used
> to be a BIG Red Hat fan, but that mishandled
> transition got me to move my main Linux box to Debian.
> Still, as a training tool I keep my 2nd oldest Linux
> PC running FC4 (the oldest PC runs Coyote :-) )...

Well for the business model redhat has chosen to go with, a freely
distributed linux is not the way to go, so yeah they got rid of it.
Back when internet links were slow I used to buy their cd set from the
local book store in waterloo about every 6 months for $25 or $30 or so,
and thought it was great.

> I am sure Debian can/does do a very satisfactory job
> as a router, but in my books Coyote is a
> cheaper/better solution.

Sure, it saves having a harddisk and such.  Once you have to deal with
T1/E1 drivers, ADSL drivers, etc, things grow past the ability of a
floppy rather soon.  Add a web interface and you can really forget it.

Lennart Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml