Message from discussion Gateway Question

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From: Tim Smith <reply_in_gr...@mouse-potato.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Gateway Question
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 2006 00:54:50 -0000
Organization: Institute of Lawsonomy, Department of Suction and Pressure
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References: <87d5b0sff6.fsf@mail.com>
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In article <87d5b0sff6....@mail.com>, Hadron Quark wrote:
> What if any, is the advantage of using a small old pc as a linux wireless
> gateway rather than using a small dedicated netgear box which costs about
> 60 euro and consumes considerably less power?

About a millisecond on ping. :-)

More flexible configuration, including some pretty cool QOS things.  But not
anything that most people will care about.

However, you can also consider taking the small old PC beyond just being a
gateway.  For instance, put Postfix on it and configure that to relay
through your ISP's SMTP server.  Then configuring mail clients on your
computers is simple: outgoing SMTP server = 192.168.0.1 (or whatever the IP
is you use for the gateway).  If you ever change ISPs, you only have to
change the mail configuration in one place, the gateway, rather than on each
computer.

Put an IMAP server on the gateway machine (trivial with the UW IMAP
server...and I've heard that Dovecot is as easy).  Set up fetchmail to grab
your mail from your ISP (and from any other mail accounts you have).  Then
you can configure all your other computers to read mail from the IMAP server
on 192.168.0.1.  Configure them to store all mailboxes (drafts, sent mail,
trash, etc) on the server.  Result: you can now read your email from any of
your computers, and if you reply to message from computer A, then later when
you are on computer B, your mail client there will know that the message has
been read and replied to.

Add Apache, and install a webmail package, and you can then provide yourself
with access to your email from outside.  (Or you can configure the gateway
to allow IMAP access over SSL from outside).

Add in procmail and you can do nice mail filtering on the gateway, and use
spamassassin for spam filtering.  Now you've got central filters and spam
handling, so you don't have to go edit mail filters on all your machines
whenever you want to change a rule, or train all your machines to recognize
spam.

Buy a large external drive and add it to the gateway.  Make it available via
samba or webdav or nfs.  You now have a convenient place to back up things
from all your other computers.  Or a convenient drop point for moving files
between computers.

Keep your calendar and address book and todo list on the gateway machine.
Now if you add a contact, or complete an item, or need to change an
appointment, you can do it from whatever machine you are on, and have it
show up everywhere.

If all you want is a simple network gateway, there really isn't any good
reason to pick a Linux PC over a dedicated gateway.  However, it is very
useful to have a home server providing a variety of services, one of which
happens to be network gateway.  Linux is terrific in this role.

-- 
--Tim Smith