Instant Linux Router, Just Add Hardware
The other day at work someone smacked me with a clue-by-four in regards to a new Linux distro for the purpose of routing. It’s called Vyatta. You can buy their hardware or download the distro and roll your own. The free version is called Vyatta Community Edition which is on release 4, otherwise known as VC4. Now my main machine runs Fedora Linux, and it is EVERYTHING for my network. DHCP, DNS, Internal Web, VPN Server for my box at work, etc. Now the more I’ve played around with Linux over the 11+ years I’ve used it. The more I’ve wished for a seamless router solution based on it that rivaled enterprise level gear. Don’t get me wrong, I like my machine handling network functions more than using a $50 router out of the local retailer, but I’ve always had a need for slightly more. Take in mind, I work in IT, I went to school for IT, and I’m (re)studying for Cisco certifications. Cisco is good gear, no doubt about it. That’s why they have such a market share of the enterprise level stuff. But it’s prohibitively expensive for home users and small businesses that could use advanced functionality. Looks like Vyatta may be the cure for that. So I took the liberty of downloading the community version of it and loading it up. Now I have a mini-itx board I found for cheap at an online auction along with an LCD that I dug up at a recycling center (thrown away because its base was broken), a CF-IDE converter, and other bits and pieces. I figured a router should be embedded with no mechanical storage. Burn the CD off, boot the test board up on an old CD-ROM, and then I ran CFDISK to partition the Compact Flash. Once done I ran the setup script as detailed in the documentation, only straying from the defaults when it asked me to create partitions. I now understand that this is unneeded and that the setup script will handle Compact Flash. Now for the next part, learning the system. VC4 has a Command Line Interface (CLI) to it, but it’s specific to VC4. VC3 had a web interface I’m told, and VC4 is predicted to have one at a later date. So now I have to learn the command line. There is a quick start guide, but I have yet to have time to read it. This is just step one.
My test setup for Vyatta
Intel D945GCLF 533FSB DDR2 667 533 Audio Video LAN Box Mini-ITX Motherboard
SanDisk 2GB ULTRA II CompactFlash Card (SDCFH-2048-901)
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[...] it’s official. I’ve had such an overwhelming response, according to my stats, on the Vyatta router story that I had to do another. So let’s grab some documentation and get started. By the way [...]
Instant Linux Router, Just Add Hardware | Techmerc\’s Fix it | nerdd.net…
\r\nMy first adventure in using a Linux Router Distribution called Vyatta\r\n[...] it’s of…