[H-GEN] Smoothwall dialling problem

[Ewan Edwards]

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On Tuesday 15 April 2003 09:10 pm, Robert Stanford wrote:
>
> 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.

Aahhh ...  So its not so much Smoothwall that sucks, its your experience with 
Smoothwall that sucks.  My condolences.

>
> Then what are these people going to do when something goes wrong,

Reboot and try again.


> Chances of support with Smoothwall are pretty slim. How else would a

My friend wouldn't even know how to get support even if it were available.  
That's why she called me.  Now that I think about that for a few 
milliseconds, maybe she does know how to get support.   :-)


> 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.

I think I need to elaborate a little on the particular situation here.  
My friend was wanting to get on to the internet from her Windows PC at home 
and asked me to set it up for her.  I was willing to do that but I insisted 
she do something to protect her system from the 'nasties' out there.  My 
first suggestion was to rebuild her PC as a Linux box, but she wouldn't have 
a bar of that.  The second option was to make it dual boot Windows/Linux 
using Linux for the 'net and Windows for other stuff.  That idea was given 
the short shrift as well.  Eventually I convinced her that, using an old 486 
PC I had lying around, I could build a firewall that would be easy for her to 
operate.  So, up until the dialing problem, she was happily doing all her 
internet banking, "MSN Messenger"ing, etc. with some degree of safety from 
her Win2k PC.



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