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List:       leaf-user
Subject:    Re: [leaf-user] What's the difference between LEAF and
From:       Ray Olszewski <ray () comarre ! com>
Date:       2004-02-27 7:23:07
Message-ID: 5.1.0.14.1.20040226230315.01ee7f20 () celine
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At 04:11 AM 2/27/2004 +0000, joah moat wrote:
>I was just wondering, what is the difference between having a LEAF box and 
>just going out and buying a hardware router for fifty bucks.

This question is harder to answer than it used to be because, honestly, the 
cheap routers have gotten better. Once, they weren't very cheap or very 
versatile; now they are better on both scores.

Still, LEAF has some advantages in all but the very simplest of settings, 
and sometimes even in them.

One big advantage is greater flexibility, permitting their use on more 
different situations. The cheap routers support a single LAN; LEAF routers 
can support a true DMZ and other complicated physical setups. The cheap 
routers are NAT'ing routers; LEAF routers can do regular as well as NAT'd 
routing. iptables (Shorewall, usually) provides a greater degree of control 
over firewalling. Multiple VPN options exist. The router itself can run 
more services, such as DNS. I don't think the cheap routers can do proxy 
ARP. And so on.

The other big advantage derives from all the software involved being Open 
Source. Rather than argue this in the abstract,  let me point to a recent 
counterexample: Belkin recently modified its router firmware so it 
automatically redirects a random http request, once every 8 hours or so, to 
Belkin's Website to promote its Parental Control Service. Read about the 
details here --

         http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/07/1740205&tid=153
         http://www.marco.org/content/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=36

Now my guess is that this bit of inventiveness won't survive the negative 
press it's getting ... but it does illustate the vulnerabilites users have 
when they surrender control over the software that connects them to the 
Internet.





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