Wireless routers

[Christopher Browne]

On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Anthony de Boer <adb-SACILpcuo74 at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> 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.

Actually, the last couple of "cheapo devices" I have picked up *have*
had a place in the menu where you can download a consolidated list of
all the configuration.

I should probably be drawing that out and stowing it in my
"GitEverything" repo.  Extra points, presumably, for scripting wget to
do this automagically.

The once I tried out one of the "micro firewall distributions," I was
unimpressed by the number of text files I'd have to manage to get
stuff working, and the distribution was sufficiently minimalist (and
predated git!) such that it wasn't particularly reasonable to manage
the config files in a coherent way.  Of course, that was a few years
ago, if it predated Git :-).
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