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

[Mauricio Tavares via TriLUG]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Scott Chilcote via TriLUG
<trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> 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.
>
      Vyatta is pretty impressive. I think I still know an engineer
there; haven't talked to her in a while.

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