[KLUG Members] no route to local network?

[Bruce Smith]

> And Bruce, I know you're a D-L developer from my lurking on this list 
> for a couple years now.  A firewall that doesn't require a hard drive 
> sounds good on paper, but if you go that way you need a CD-ROM and a 
> floppy (or a flash disk, I suppose, but I don't have one).  I've seen 
> significantly higher mortality rates with optical drives and floppies 
> over the years than I've seen on hard drives, not counting the IBM 75gxp 
> series. This was with light use from the CD, and I don't want to think 
> about how much thrashing you'd have if the machine is starved for 
> memory.  Removable drives have a whole host of potential problems, with 
> dust, unbalanced media, media getting stuck, and etc.  I'd much rather 
> trust an appliance to a single hard drive system and have it email me 
> config backups every month than a burned CD and a floppy, either of 
> which could make the machine unusable.

I wouldn't want a CDROM that is constantly spinning either.  Which is
why I use D-L for dedicated applications, and once the program is loaded
into memory, I never see the CDROM spin up under normal usage.

i.e.  I run both of my company's DNS servers on old Pentium hardware
running D-L.  The CD never spins up unless I SSH into them and
edit/update some files (not often).

I also run my company's proxy server on D-L, with a hard drive storing
the cache and log files.  Again, the CD never spins up unless I SSH into
the box to change something.  The reason I use D-L on this box is for
ease of upgrading.  Just burn a new CDR and reboot, MUCH faster than any
other distro than I've ever used.

I also run a simple web server on one D-L box, and simple FTP servers on
a couple other boxes.  All have hard drives for the data, and the same
reasons as above.  (plus the CD never spins up while running)

And of course my D-L firewall/VPN boxes never spin up the CD, unless
(you guessed it) I log in and change something.

I don't run my company's mail server or samba server on D-L for various
other reasons.  I do believe in the best distro for the application.
You'll have to decide the "best" distro for what you do.   :-)

 - BS