On Mar 23, 2007, at 3:40 AM, Hector Martin wrote:

> If you want a box that will never, ever, ever get cracked, get 
> OpenBSD..

I had a coworker, a real unix wizard (contributed to kernel, etc), who
one day found that his home unix system (I *think* some BSD variant)
had become a distribution point for assorted copyrighted material by
assorted people that he wasn't at all associated with.  Ie cracked, in
a sort of low profile way.

It's not how good you are, it's whether you're paying attention to
every little thing that could go wrong.  Use windows and you get to
yell at microsoft for issues.  Use a real router, and you trust the
router sw vendor.  Use linux, and you're on your own!  (yeah, you
do a lot better if you can find a distribution that installs ONLY
the bits and pieces that you're interesting in, rather than a
windows-like "install the world" distribution.  Except that those
limited distributions tend to have more limited support as well.)

There's a big market for used cisco gear on eBay.  I'm not sure
you'll find the sort of features you're looking for in old SW on
old platforms, though.  I'd be very inclined to separate my routing
functionality from firewall-type functions into separate boxes, but
I'm pretty old-school.

BillW
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