Wireless routers

[Anthony de Boer]

Christopher Browne wrote:
> Yeah, you can get routers that'll run Tomato or OpenWRT, or such, but
> it seems to me that this is rather more fragile than getting "some
> generic Linksys thing," running it *stock*, with a configuration that
> can be described on a sheet of paper kept in a notebook, and which can
> be replaced without having to think too hard about it.  I'm finding
> that I prefer to treat my router as an appliance that's as dumb as I
> can keep it.

With OpenWRT, I can rsync a copy of all the config files (basically
anything that's been changed from the default root filesystem), keep
them in git, diff one version from another, compare the config before
and after a change, back out a change that didn't work, make a new
router act exactly like the one before it, etc.

When something's not working, I can ssh in and run things like
tcpdump and get a good look at what's happening on the wire.

Even in the olden Cisco days, you could pull the entire config as a
single text file and keep a copy, use diff and other tools, etc.

Modern GUI consumer-grade or enterprise-grade stuff, though, has you
going through menus copying stuff down to paper, and you can't always
be certain you got to every last sub-menu, nor do you want to do the
full diligence everytime you've made one minor change.

Stuff that doesn't let me bring real sysadmin tools to bear is what's
fragile.

-- 
Anthony de Boer
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