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Here is info that a couple of the consumer media link boxes run Linux.
The MS box is one that uses something else, possibly a version of Windows.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2005/04/28/review_linktheater/page10.html

Actually, he's probably partly referring to the routers flooding their wireless connection which happens with Zyxel routers too.
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/lans_routers/charts/ index.html?chart=124
You set up a p2p like bittorrent that is willing to use a lot of simulataneous connections and it floods your router and your connection drops.
Of course, it does sound like a lot of routers(1 a month?) to go through so if he's returning a lot of dead routers, a possible power problem in the home is possible.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/lans_routers/charts/ index.html?chart=124

P2P can choke low end routers.

OK. This isn't free. But, for a business, it is pretty close.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/09/26/netgear_s sl312_ssl_vpn_gateway_review/

This is a small hardware box available for under $400 that looks like it may do what you want.

I do admit that there are free software options available, but those require a server somewhere, and probably a bit of trial-and-error and time to get it running. This hardware box, on the other hand, looks like it would be set up in less than an hour.

Just an option...

http://tomsnetworking.com/2006/08/11/qnap_ts101_na s_review/

or lok at a review of the asus unit here: http://torrentfreak.com/review-the-wireless-bittor rent-router/

http://www.engadget.com/2004/08/05/who-you-gonna-c all-the-bluesniper/ http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2005/03/08/how_to_bl uesniper_pt1/

Here is why you are seeing the bittorrent drops: http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/06/08/linksys_w rt54g_v5_really_is_a_lousy_router/

A better review is available from Tom's Networking, including comparison to one of the $4000 Cognio devices:

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/02/12/review_wi spy/

Comparison table on page 2:
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/02/12/review_wi spy/page2.html

A better review is available from Tom's Networking, including comparison to one of the $4000 Cognio devices:

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/02/12/review_wi spy/

Comparison table on page 2:
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/02/12/review_wi spy/page2.html

Tom's Hardware (Networking) had a pretty good review on this awhile back.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/02/12/review_wi spy/

A year ago Tom's Hardware ran this article describing how some guys built a "Bluetooth Sniper Rifle". It has over a mile of range, and cost only a few hundred dollars to build. Less if you build it without the gratuitous gun stock.

Remember this gadget?

Who says there won't be a RFID-Sniper in the future?

A link for Simple Share NAS would be great, though I'm going to google it as soon as I finish writing this. Also, how strong is the encryption and have there been any administrative issues, flakiness, etc.?


The only flakieness I know about is one I did and had to send it in to be recovered. Use share passwords if you are using an encrypted drive. Do not do like I did and make some shares, provide passwords, then create users with user privilages, and then create an encrypted pool. It loops the software and no longer talks to the LAN. The magic reset to factory defaults does not recover from that. Other than that, read the Tom's Networking review. The rest of it is right on. The other thing a little weird is the 250G drive has a 3 year warranty but the 160G drive has only 1 year.. Go figure. Anyway the link;

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2005/04/15/review_st inas250/

Certanly. Read the Tomsnetworking review. It's in about the 4th page of the review.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2005/04/15/review_st inas250/page4.html

Snip Digging deeper into the menus revealed some advanced functionality that didn't appear to be advertised anywhere on SimpleTech's web site or product brochures. I found menus for creating encrypted, mirrored and striped shares, which are RAID capabilities that I have not seen in other boxes of the same class. Selecting the Help button on this screen brought up a full help listing for all features of the box, including these advanced ones. Reading through the help menus indicated that the mirror and striping capabilities are designed to be used on external drives plugged into the box.

end snip

It's one of the main reasons I bought it. Raid, Encryption and easly hidden someplace to be left behind in a raid or burglary. What more could a geek want?

Linksys has had this for quite a while now - they call it "SES" (Secure Easy Setup). Details here or here .

Mod parent up.

I can't believe anyone would recommend anything else for a geek besides the NSLU2!!

It runs based on Linux, so you can replace the firmware
Not only do you have a NAS device, which you can mirror disks on, but then you can basically add on whatever you want, eg Firewall, web/mail/file server, music center, VOIP PBX, use NFS as well as Samba etc.

Tom's Networking has a little howto on this.

And if you're interested in more information, CmdrTaco I've found this other site where you can often find some good information from users about techy related stuff that matters.

LinkSys NSLU2. Plugs into your home network. (10/100) Then you get yourself 2 IDE drives and 2 USB 2.0 enclosures then plug them in. Then you can set it to periodically back-up one drive to the other. Sure, it's not as bullet-proof as RAID5. But it's dead simple, cheap, and it just works. Failure recovery is dead simple. Also, the system is has some of the same flexibility as the Buffalo Teraserver. (Plug in your friend's USB 2.0 drive when he comes over.)

Also, with this scheme, you can delete a file and change your mind. (Recover from the back-up before the weekly copy job.)

And, if this is too simple for your geek quotient, it's Linux-based and hackable!

ReadyNAS is reported to be a better choice than Buffalo. There is a Tom's Networking review on ReadyNAS 600 that compares the two fairly well. It costs a bit more (~1100) for the same amount of storage, but it's worth it if the quality is that much better. Also, I've been told you can have two of them where one remotely backs-up the other . . . which allows for disaster recovery where the physical location of the original is destroyed.

First off, who wrote this review? Sounds to me like an Anthology Solutions employee trying to be all slashdotty.

I just looked at the specs for this and am not that impressed. Like many other NAS devices, they claim OS/X support, but support is not via AFP. Though their docs make no mention of it, the YellowMachine is almost certainly running SAMBA only, and OS/X support is also through SAMBA. The problem with this is primarily long filenames. Try backing up your music collection to a SMB/CIFS box, and you'll see what I mean. IMHO, if you don't have AFP support, then you don't support Macs.

Similarly, there's no support for rsync or (given what Tom's Networking has to say) file access via FTP or HTTP. And this may be just me, but who wants a router, DHCP server, a firewall, and a proxy server embedded in a NAS box? And $1300? That's cheap?

I recently purchased a RAID enabled SOHO NAS appliance. I spent a long time figuring out exactly what was needed in a mixed OS/X, Windows, Linux environment. I picked the Infrant ReadyNAS box. You can see my blog entry on this subject for details as to why. In short: support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, rsync, webdav, and FTP. Support for UPS devices. Support for Gigabit Ethernet. Very good documentation and an even better (employee active) user forum. And I got a TB of storage (650MB after RAID 5 formatting) for $1,000.

The Yellow Machine's RAID features can bring a greater degree of confidence in the safety of your data than you might find in an inexpensive consumer NAS device. In addition, the flexibility of its built-in switch and router bring extra capabilities to the table in a compact form-factor.

But the Yellow Machine misses the mark on a number of points, especially its primary value-proposition of being an all-in-one box for small-office users. If all you want is a basic NAT firewall, the Yellow Machine will probably suit you. But its use of a proxy that is limited only to email and web protection (and buggy at that) will give you fits if you want to limit what users can do on the Internet. Frankly, you'd be a lot better served buying a $40 router and just setting the Yellow Machine to Storage mode.

But even as a NAS, the Yellow Machine fails to match up to RAID competion like Buffalo's TeraStation and Infrant's ReadyNAS due to its missing print server, inability to connect to USB-based storage devices and missing support of user file access via FTP and HTTP.

The bottom line is that the Yellow Machine's relatively high cost, merely modest performance, and problematic proxy behaviors should cause prospective purchasers to think twice before buying.

I also reviewed this machine in an article on TomsNetworking. My review included fun things like pulling the power from one of the RAID drives while streaming a movie, comparative performance graphs, etc.

Here's my review.

this was rumored months ago and even reviewed in such.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article134. php

Yup, I've been looking for an affordable NAS unit for a while and for one reason or another I was not satisfied with what I had seen so far (the Burly box, Buffalotech NAS amount others). I recently discovered Infrant and I have to agree, either the ReadyNAS X6 or ReadyNAS 600 is a great way for home or SOHO users to easily backup and store a lot of data quickly and easily.

Infrant uses a dedicated custom CPU (NSP) specifically designed for network storage and a Linux based OS to achieve excellent performance at a reasonable price point. The X6 is ideal for home users as it offers a hybrid RAID technology (Infrant calls it X-RAID) that allows you to start off with a single drive and simply add drives (even of different sizes) as time and money allow. As you add drives the unit changes from a single drive system to RAID.

For a good idea of how these units perform check out the review in tomsnetworking, in short- they kick ass.
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-217-ProdID-H 2H5.php

Note, Infrant also offers rackmount NAS for more hardcore storage needs - and no, I don't have any affiliation w/ Infrant, I am just happy that someone finally made something that fills my requirements.

When is Cisco, D-Link, Netgear, going to learn to turn on encryption by default?

It still astounds me that computers seem to halve people's intelligence. What is WEP going to get you?

Yes, I just karma whored a google search for "WEP encryption break".

Also, I don't use WEP at home, nor do I use any kind of encryption by default at work for our ethernet. In fact, I've only heard of things that are by default encrypted like interbank communication, and I would assume the military might use some encryption between some links, but its not universal.

So please, WAP manufactures, start doing what none of us already do on a daily basis. It will improve security.

Here the coverage Tom's Hardware has. Some nice pictures, now I at least know what the guy looks like.

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article131. php

It seems, after investigating further that the NSLU2 can trasfer data at around 4-6 Mbytes/s on average. Faster than the WL-HDD, though still rather slow if you want to use it extensively, maybe even having an NFS mount on it.

The Linksys NSLU2 has already been hacked so you can run your own applications on it. :-)

That said, the one aspect of it I like is the ease of extensibility. Daisy chaining these units is quite an attractive thing.

I have been considering some form of distrubuted storage cluster. In other words an array of machines which presents a single logical drive with redundency on a machine basis. Do people here have any experience with this (GFS et al.)? Care to comment?

[shameless plug] In case anyone is wondering, the backup s/w is my own concontion yarbu. Which automates hourly, daily, weekly and monthly backups. I've been running this for about a year with ~1TB of backup under its control, spanning about a dozen machines. It's a lifesaver (not as fancy-shmancy as some others but very reliable).

There was a very interesting article posted on Tom's Networking Guide a while ago about how ridiculously simple it is for people nowadays to crack WEP keys using an assortment of techniques such as replay attacks and forced dissassociations.

The Article also includes tips to keep wireless access points relatively secure.
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article111- page5.php

And here's another article about WEP and how it has become one of the most insecure methods of encryption over the years.
http://securityfocus.com/infocus/1814

Thank God the FBI is on our side.

You can't hack a bluetooth easily unless you are within 15 feet of a person who also has bluetooth.

Is that a fact?

If that gets slashdotted, just UTFSE--bluetooth sniper hack gets you tons of relevant info.

Yes, that's pretty visible on a bus, but what if I stand by the window of my 11-floor office and snipe the mindless drones walking the streets?

...add one of these bad boys and shake vigorously.

Mmm... phreaky...

You can't just sit around and wait for interesting traffic. You have to make your own traffic.

Pretty well documented, too.

I repalced Astaro with m0n0wall, and have most of the features I used - minus some of the application proxies.
I have a tor installation on the box - easy to set-up with privoxy, after i added Perl to the m0n0 mix (big as the rest of the distribution!)

There are some add-ons, too.

...his instrument isn't plugged in!

http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Sections-article106. php.nyud.net:8090

Jim Buzbee was one of the first with his articles on Tom's hardware on Hacking the NSLU2.

There are now a number of developers that have extended the abilities and have added over 50 applications packages. You can see their work at the NSLU2 Wiki. They rock! Thanks guys!!!

Look here http://www.etslan.com/ethernet.php
and
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/Reviews-139-ProdID-C ABLELAN.php
I think though that coax can only carry 10BaseT connections.

MCT, and by default Tritton and Iogear, according to this site, are not living up to their GPL obligations on these NAS devices.

I used to frequent Tom's years ago when they where only linked at sysdoc.pair.com and you got unique and relatively dependable reviews. But I really have to compare their information more and more these days to filter the noise. Tomsnetworking.com is about the only interesting spin-off to me. Just not worth my time for hardware reviews. Either they've spread themselves to thin or gotten addicted to the money. Ho-hum.

Amazing! Thanks. Any advice about how to install OpenVPN on the WRT54G? Which package would you recommend? Do the OpenWrt packages have an adminstration console? I don't see any mention of that. It looks complicated, since I read that there is no Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) until installed.

Also, I note that OpenVPN will NOT work on Windows XP SP2 unless the pre-release version 2.0 is used. I suppose you don't care if you are using a WRT54G at both ends of the VPN. I'm not knowledgeable about this, but I guess that running VPN software on a WRT54G would be more secure than running it on a PC.

I note that Sveasoft provides firmware with PPTP VPN software, but there seems to be some question about whether PPTP is sufficiently secure.

Just guessing, but this seems to be a considerable job to configure. I wish there were a commercial release with the OpenVPN built in.

OpenWrt.

Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband Router.

Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with SpeedBooster.

WRT54GS has updated chipset.

WRT54GS Under $70.

Both Linksys products have GPL'd firmware.

There is intense interest in the WRT54G and WRT54GS. One company, Sveasoft, provides upgraded firmware.

Actually I shouldn't give Tom's Hardware a hard time (like everyone else seems to). As articles go, the reviews of high-end ink-jets, the 8-channel RAID6 card and the Viewsonic media center were quite interesting (and a lot more recent than the CPU round-up too).

These days though, my favourite reviewer is Dan (who posts here now and then). Dan seems to understand that a million graphs showing you the statistically insignificant difference between the latest mobos / graphic cards / processors / ram sinks don't really make a great site.

Who still uses WEP? The weeknesses in WEP have been known for some time, and there have been more than a few working crackers in the wild for quite a while now.

WPA is the money. It's far more secure than WEP in that it has key rotation, and some of the snazzier base stations already support AES as the cryptographic algorithm. Most older stations with dilligent vendors will at least support WPA with TKIP (RC4 with rotating keys), since it's a trivial addition from a compute-intensiveness point of view.

That said, if you do insist on sticking with WEP (some people prefer classic cars to modern ones as well, I guess), or even less (ie, run an open base station) at least ensure that your access point is configured to only allow your specific MAC (as well as those you trust) to peer with it. This will at least keep the bandwidth sucklers off your back.

Unless, of course, being suckled upon is what you like. At that point, do what you want. I'm Canadian, so my personal bandwidth is everyones bandwidth.

Ahhh... socialism. :)

As for PPTP, switch to using KAME, FreeS/WAN or your IPSec implementation of choice. You can, of course, even use IPSec to do transport level encryption for your wireless connection if your base station doesn't support WPA, though you would need additional boxen to do this, of course.

Both of these (WPA and IPSec) provide the same functionality as what they replace (WEP and PPTP) with additional security benefits. We moved to WPA for our corporate access points over a year ago and have been running a 100% IPSec (SonicWall, specifically) VPN for just as long. They're functional, production tested and very secure.

Don't wait. Do it now.

Interesting, the same technology is used in Airgo Networks' True MIMO but it seems they can reach only 40-50Mbit/s. The "interesting" part is that it gives you still 10-15Mbit/s 120meters far away the house (with the router inside). So, time of cantennas is over? The bad news are these company's declarations: "Pre-n is shorthand for "Wi-Fi compatible 802.11a/b/g products that offer MIMO OFDM extensions. Pre-n gives the significant benefits of 802.11n along with Wi-Fi compatibility today. Pre-n does not mean interoperability with future 11n products in the 11n modes." I hope Siemens' 1Gbps would be inside a real standard and not some strange/inconsistent private implementation like modern "2X" wifi technologies

Tom's Networking just did a review that covers this subject, including how to serve tunage to it over a Linux server (they mention the hacked NSLU2 project, but it sounds like any Linux box could do the job).

Or, heck, skip the network and just use CompactFlash.

The Kuro Box from Buffalo might be a better choice if you want to go the NAS route.

The Linksys NSLU2 may be a good palce to start.

TomsNetworking has a good article about messing around with it.

Add a USB network card and a big USB key and you should be good to go (it has 2 USB ports).

If they really wanted to foster "development, delivery, and adoption," they'd use open standards instead of their proprietary specs.

Indeed... this from TomsNetworking: "The VIIP program is based on "proprietary specifications" created by AT&T and is designed to "stimulate and foster" applications and devices compatible with AT&T's VoIP services."

How about the NSLU2?

It has been covered before on Slashdot and is hackable just like the router you mentioned.

Yeah, that's where I'm heading too. Even the $80 Linksys WRT54GS has a faster processor, right? I don't know how economical these Single-Board-Computers are, but you can get pretty fast CPUs for a reasonable amount of money, and low-power enough to still not require a fan. Are these sort of things in the realm of hobbyists, or does it become to expensive/difficult to engineer single quantities of these?