RiotACT's bad week

Hmm, take out the HD risk and throw in CD’s and ancient floppies? I think you’re about even there, modern HD’s don’t break like they used to.

When my previous employer was bought out by a multinational they looked at the nested set of bridging firewalls Kramer and I had built for it (out of 200Mhz surplus computers with exrta NICs) and freaked out, they sent down a contractor to replace it with something more “standard”.

In one of the prouder moments of my life he reported back to head office that his replacement was going to be technically inferior to the system we’d built. (they still replaced it)

So in the right place, for the right reasons, I’ve a fan of the home built box as firewall.

But for just sitting at the top of the network with some NAT and port forwarding to a single box I’ll take the solid state appliance for under $200 any day.

Fans are the killer point of failure these days and by the time you source a computer with a fanless power supply and modify it to use a CF card in place of a hard drive, plus set aside a spare machine with identical NICs to act as a replacement it really gets easier to just go with the consumer appliance. I guess it depends what your time is worth.

Anyway, I may be a journalist, but I’ve always worked for the smaller organisations where if you want the IT sorted you need to do it yourself.

And personally I like to get this stuff sorted.

Good points. Never thought about the latency between the two cards, the hardware routers are more ‘efficiently’ designed for that task (been doing some reading). So under normal load, they ‘should’ be faster. But to my benchmarking my monowall pc (an under-clocked Celeron 300a) solution beats my D-Link (and old Linksys) routers for keeping latency low when I’ve got the connection throttled with heaps of bittorrent connections (maybe I need a newer hd router).

On points of failure, monowall etc don’t require a hdd, all the config files sit on a floppy disk. If the machine fails, stick the CD-ROM and Floppy in another computer and bang, you have replaced the router without having to recreate a single setting.

If you under-clock the cpu, you can do without the cooling fan. Because there is no hard drive, you don’t need a case fan. Two less points of failure.

Power supplies always fail in the end, even the one on the end of the embedded router’s power cord.

Anyway, you seem to know a lot about networking for a journalist. I could crap on all day about computers, and from the sounds of it so could you. Maybe you could pass your wisdom on next time there is a riot-act barbq or something.

Love the site, don’t care how long it takes to load.

I don’t find the site slow.. infact it loads quicker than a lot of other sites i frequent… even on my shitty home dialup connection.

in defence of the old rt314 while it’s internal cooling fans had died it still kept operating, just degrading under load.

While that complicated our debugging efforts it’s impressive in its way.

The new router is 100% passive cooling.

Now that i’ve been thinking about it another thing that could slow the site down for some is the amount of google javascript that has to execute between the ads and the analytics package.

Anyway, we’re satisfied with performance at the moment.

netgear stuff is pretty reliable in general.

Farq, back in 2000 that’s exactly what we were looking at doing. But a computer running smoothwall adds a massive number of extra points of failure.

(hard drive, cooling fans, power supply to name a few)

Plus there’s networking latency on the two cards having to run through the CPU and back out again.

The new router is a lot more powerful than a DSE branded product and is not running stock software.

Five years without trouble is almost certainly better than we would have had through an old box running smoothwall.

The page would load a lot faster if we didn’t have all the pretty large images… but they’re SOOO pretty!

I’ve even got an old PII-200mhz/128mb I could donate to the cause!

Johnboy: Why not build the router using an old computer. Just throw a second nic into any old box, download smoothwall or monowall or something and away you go (I’m a big fan of using openbsd on routers).

I’m no expert (your prob a bigger nerd than me), but the consumer routers you buy at dick smith or whatever are lucky to be even 100mhz, with bugger all memory. Not the best thing to stick infront of a high use web server. Sure they work fine with a couple of connections, but increase the load and the little routers struggles to keep up. Latency and dropped packets are the result.

The only advantage the of the little routers is they are quite.

I’ve gotta say that The-RiotAct does load pretty slowly (could be the HTML render, I know next to nothing about html/css).

BTW: I’m a database nerd, not too much into networking. I could be talking out of my ass (I often do!). Just my 2c.

Interesting to see you aren’t using DSE equipment. 🙂

johnboy, yesterday was awful. i actually did work – while checking in an obsessive compulsive manner whether RIOTACT was back up.