Byte.com: More Orchids And Onions, But No Broadband [Jerry Pournelle on Rebel, Samba, and More]

“Last month, I did the Chaos Manor User’s Choice Awards, and the
Orchid and Onion Parade. I was in a hurry to get it done, and
apparently lost some notes, so we will open with new orchids and
awards before the Chaos Story of the Month.”

“First, the Rebel Netwinder Linux appliance tool I use to
connect to the Internet. This little jewel sits in the cable room
and just runs. It’s a firewall, it’s a DNS Server, it works like a
router, and it sees that everything on my internal network is
connected — alas still through a 56K US Robotics Courier Modem —
to the external world. It uses a rather underpowered little RISC
chip, but it does the job, and gets a large orchid with carnations.
More good news: Rebel is bringing out a new model based on Intel
hardware.”

“One of the things I like about Linux is its flexibility — you
can use Linux on your desktop workstation, on a high-volume Web
server, as a firewall or router, as a back-end database server,
etc. My little Netwinder communications server from www.rebel.com
is, in fact, a StrongARM RISC-based computer running a variant of
Red Hat Linux. It’s quiet, it handles my Internet connectivity and
security, and it just works.”

Complete
Story