Planet e0r

Nowadays you can buy (DSL) Routers from Netgear, D-Link, Linksys and others at the supermarket. But what features do really count in a business environment? Here are my top list of features, which you can not read on the fancy cool looking packing at the supermarket.

Note: This list of features is nothing special for real business routers with a much higher pricetag. This is a list for consumer products that may be used in a small office.

1. VPN capability

Router can act as a VPN Endpoint for IPSec/L2TP/PPTP? Got a “Basic Interop” Cert (VPNC)? This information is somewhat easy to find. But better hidden and often crippled are the “VPN Pass Through” features. There are often limitations on which types of VPNs are supported and HOW MANY concurrent connections are possible. There are routers on the market that do not support more than one PPTP VPN connection! Others support up to 100 or 200 concurrent connections but only with one VPN endpoint or of the same VPN type (IPSec, PPTP or PPTP). (e.g. AVM Fritzbox, some Netgear Routers)
2. Logging features

Syslog and sometimes SNNP Support is available. But the format and usefullness of the logs vary a lot. What can be logged, what format is the output? (e.g. for easy database import) (Netgear, AVM, D-Link)
3. QoS and Traffic Shaping

these features are important for traffic like VoIP and VPN traffic. This traffic needs higher priorities to be usefull on a loaded system. there are IEEE Standards like 802.11p or 802.11q for this (also some vendor specific solutions).

4. Firewalling

often a basic firewall ist required. This belongs only to OUTGOING traffic, almost every router blocks all incoming connections by default. A typicall installation would allow a “block all” rule and a white list of specific services allowed (port based). This “block all & whitelist” is not possible on every router! (e.g. WPNT834)

You can read alot about Chinas “Great Firewall” and how it restricts access to evil sites like BBC or newsweek and that chinese bloggers might get arested for political opinons but you can not read very much about the rules of the game:

When i go to china,

• what is allowed to do on the net and whats not?
• how does the filtersystem work from a technical point of view?

I ve got no intention to circumvent these filtering / restrictions. I want to understand the DOs and DONTs in China when it comes to the Internet.

MS is developing a new shell for some time now. Microsoft changed the Name from MSH into Monad into the so incredible cool and unique buzzword “PowerShell”. Good work marketing guys! Especially the acronym “ps” is a really good idea…

Ok, despite that stupid name, the PoSh is now available as RC1 for download.

Its not just an addon like the Scripting Host, its a replacement for the gold old cmd.exe in Vista (server?)
Its based on .NET and its object oriented. The Pipling (output of so called cmdlets) is not (only) textbased as one might expect from a shell its and .NET object the every cmdlet (command-let) returns.

Firebird, the FREE relational SQL database previously known as Interbase, is a solid and robust but not very commonly known database. That means its a bit more difficult to get things working. There is no huge community with hunderts of HowTos, Wikis, etc you can reefer to.

I ve tried to get into Firebird Databases a year ago. I’ve tried to find information on howto setup a Firebird database in MS SQL Server as a “Linked Server” and didnt find any complete solution for this on the net. It took alot more time than i thought to set it up probably because of missing information from the community, but it gets better every day. The community is growing fast.
Today is my 2nd encounter with the Firebird-System. I need to setup a automated Backup. Google can clear things up for me:

There are to different backup Systems in Firebird:

nBackup included in Firebird 2.0 an up

and gBak included in Firebird since humm, good old Borland days back in 199x up to the (still in beta) Firebird 2.0.

When you dont want to struggle with the commandline switches of gbak, you can use the (very useful) GUI-Frontend for gbak developed and provided for free by Talat Dogan: FIBS Firebird-Interbase Backup Scheduler