[H-GEN] Smoothwall dialling problem

Hilton Travis Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Tue Apr 15 17:27:14 EDT 2003


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On Tue, 2003-04-15 at 21:10, Robert Stanford wrote:
> 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.

SmoothWall GPL 2.0 supports ext3.

Your choice to not submit a bug report is a choice you made.  Its up to
you as to what you do.

> 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.

Yup, Richard can get a bit overbearing, rude, arrogant, and plain
offensive at times.  Generally the times he's awake.  He's rarely
online, tho, and even rarer now that he's quit the SmoothWall project.

> > 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.

Many people cannot understand the intricacies of firewalls, Linux,
security, or even a two-button mouse.  SmoothWall GPL was obviously
designed to be a distro that installs on many systems and provides a
quite secure firewall for home users.  As such, it does quite a decent
job at what it was trying to do.  Sure, you can write your own firewall,
but how many regular home users would have their heads exploding before
they got even halfway through what's needed to do this?

Hhmmm - I didn't realize that it was a bad thing to make a living from
your efforts.  Silly me!

-- 

Regards,

Hilton Travis                   Email: Hilton at QuarkAV.com
Manager                         Phone: +61-(0)7-3343-3889
Quark AudioVisual               Phone: +61-(0)419-792-394
Quark Computers
(Brisbane, Australia)            http://www.QuarkAV.com/

Non Linear Video Editing Solutions & Digital Audio Workstations
 Network Administration, SmoothWall Firewalls, NOD32 AntiVirus
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War doesn't determine who is right.  War determines who is left.


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