[H-GEN] Smoothwall dialling problem

[Robert Stanford]

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On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 20:08, Hilton Travis wrote:
> Hi Robert,
> Care to elaborate.  Unsubstantiated trolling like this does nobody any
> good.

Scuse my quick one line _troll_, it's called having 2 minutes before
going out to dinner.

It's also called a nerve struck.

1. Unless they have updated since I last wasted my time looking,
Smoothwall doesnt support any form of journaling filesystem. How
fantastic for a machine that should realy run headless with no user
intervention. I also found a bug using rtl8139 module and ISDN where
something times out before the fsck finishes and such nics wont come up
after a hard reset. After my experiences dealing with the developers I
had no interest in submitting a bug report.

2. On that note, the developers are the most amazingly arrogant ars^H^H^
people/developers I am yet to encounter. They are without equal[1]. I
once logged into the #smoothwall irc channel asking how they
autodetected the nic at install, they immediatly assumed I was after
their 'secrets'  instead of realising I was too lazy to read their
source which was mostly unobtainable at the time. The main reason was
for LTSP to do a similar trick with an initrd. Anyhow, a few days later
I jumped back in planning to offer a better solution using a pci bus
scanner. Of cource I was recognised as the same spy as before and kicked
before I could show them what we had.

> Easier - not for many people.  More secure - not for many people

Then what are these people going to do when something goes wrong,
Chances of support with Smoothwall are pretty slim. How else would a
smoothwall problem make its way to humbug mailing list? They'd be much
better off putting the bit extra time into learning how what they
install works than look the fool with no answers the minute something
goes wrong [2]. They'rs heaps of good iptables scripts out there and
almost all distributions have excellent wiz^H^H^H config scripts for
handling things like dialout ISDN and adsl. Better still get involved in
a project that doesnt have a commercial offshoot. Seriously, do you
realy think the GPL'd version will be anywhere near as polished as the
one you pay for. Oh yes of couse it will and thats the foundation of
their solid business model.
-- 
Robert Stanford <rob at rotapile.com>


[1] If your interested I have some classic irc logs concerning smoothwall developers.
[2] No offence Ewan, your original post being more of an observation.


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