The Prophesy Fortells

It's funny, because I mentioned it only a few days ago.

I was ranting or whining about the service console on the the HP1810G-8 and the Netgear GS108T-100NAS being very weak and prone to bailing a lot:  the switch is fine, and keeps switching, but the SC has crashed and one can no longer change or see the configuration on the switch via the dinky web UI.

So I'm chatting with my project manager for Atlantis, and he starts talking about the bizarre setup in the Sticks project.  We start working out the options and details around some FortiGate firewall out there, and how we should replace it with something we can use a bit better for what it can do, and what's he say?

You know, I'd just love to get some OpenWRT router out there instead.

No word of a lie!  He said it!  I didn't even coerce him.

Some more chatting ensues, and some speculation.  Yep, the FortiGate router seems to be a Linux machine, based on the lawsuit a few years back where they were apparently in violation of a licensing agreement around free software and forgot to make the Linux source code available as part of the process of using the Linux kernel in their product.

So the FortiGate product uses Linux.  X ports, some routing and VPN gear, a processor of unknown arch and speed, and some RAM.  How's that different from an OpenWRT-installed router?  The processor speed?  That'd seem to be about it.  Yeah, the UI is going to be really harsh, but I'm not so sure that's a bad tradeoff for getting 32 flavours of VPN, routing, bridging, switching, vLANs and all in a pretty box.

See the box?  Ohhhhhh.