[TriLUG] OT: Wired Gigabit Router Postscript, or Post Mortem...

[Scott Chilcote via TriLUG]

Hello LUGers,

The reason I was looking for a wired-only router in my earlier thread
was to connect my home office computers to my employer’s VPN.  The
product I wound up purchasing was a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite
<http://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeMax-EdgeRouter-ERLite-3-Ethernet/dp/B00CPRVF5K>. 
Or “ERL”, as its dedicated, cult-like fan base refers to it.

As it turns out, buying this router for such a purpose is like going to
the hardware store for a stud finder, cracking off the shrink-wrap, and
finding out that you have brought home the Starship Enterprise rev. A. 
You think about taking it back to the store, but then it occurs to you
that within seconds of arriving in a solar system it can locate and scan
all of the planets, tell you whether they have atmospheres, are
inhabitable, and harbor civilizations.  So really, it ought to be able
to tell you where the snippets of metal behind your wallboard are hiding. 

Instead of comprehensive documentation, all you have is a 16 page Quick
Start Guide.  And it doesn’t even include the word “sensor”.  But on the
other hand, there's a website address…

If advice like “The graphical configuration support is very much a work
in progress, so most users get the job done using the command line
interface” Spark your sense of intrigue, this might be your ideal
product.  And if you really begin to salivate when you see that the
software is a fork of the open source network operating system Vyatta
6.3, you /may/ have already waited too long.

I’m three weeks into setting up this pint-sized 3 port obelisk,
attempting to accomplish what I was able to do in five minutes with
DD-WRT by filling out a handful of text fields and clicking "Apply
Settings".  I spend an hour or so a day wandering through the support
forums on Ubiquiti’s website, waiting to see if one of the veteran users
will be sufficiently bored enough to share a crumb or two of laboriously
extracted knowledge.

I should have taken the hint and sent it back in the original box when I
found that the instructions for configuring a client VPN were not in the
product specific manual (there isn’t one), and not in the 50 page PDF
manual for the router’s operating system.  I eventually found those in a
wiki file on the company’s support pages, but it took Google keyword
searches to ferret them out. 

But like John Cleese in Monty Python’s cheese shop sketch, “I am keen to
guess!”  So on it goes.  Why settle for incremental progress when you
can seek out new life, and new civilizations?

Scott C.

-- 
Scott Chilcote
scottchilcote at ncrrbiz.com
Cary, NC USA