Which dickhead at Cisco thought up this idea?

[IanB]

FWIW, I think a lot of the people overreacting to this are misinterpreting the license and privacy agreement of the cloud service thing with the ones on the router itself.  So the anti-porn and privacy stuff is probably about misusing your cloud account (and you probably agreed to something very similar in order to post here on EEVBLOG; it's pretty standard stuff), rather than download stuff through the router.

But the story says that Cisco will automatically update your installed hardware to the cloud service overnight and then ask you to agree to the conditions retrospectively before being allowed to continue using your device. If you don't like it you have to call their customer service and arrange to have your router put back the way it was.

Isn't that evil?

[StubbornGreek]

Wow...I'm a bit stunned by this. Anyway, there are so many fantastic 'free' platforms that do so much more for you out there, I can't understand why anyone with any reasonable technical proficiency wouldn't be using one of them.

The basic being Untangle, Astaro, Endian, Smoothwall, - too many to list but my personal favorite by a very large margin (and yes, I've tried almost all of them) is pfSense. Who doesn't have an old pc sitting in a corner somewhere? Load OS, set to reboot automatically in bios and voila...

[baljemmett]

Ohhh well, it must be me and my Linux upbringing then. Everybody seems to prefer a Jaguar than a Subaru for going to the supermarket to buy milk.

Heh, yes indeed; I would have had no objection to just slapping together a Linux router for home, and in fact that's what I set up for my student household at university ten years ago.  (Memories of tracking down a USB ADSL modem that advertised Linux drivers only to find out they were vapourware and having to deal with USB sniffers and all sorts of crap to get it working, argh.)  But the only suitable spare machines I had lying around were old laptops, which aren't ideal -- and buying a cheap plastic router only to replace the firmware with something competent seemed too much like rewarding cheap plastic router companies for producing hardware with unpleasant firmware...  Plan B had I not got along with the IOS device was one of those little ~£100 SBC machines, tasty.

[madires]

Hi!

The basic being Untangle, Astaro, Endian, Smoothwall, - too many to list but my personal favorite by a very large margin (and yes, I've tried almost all of them) is pfSense. Who doesn't have an old pc sitting in a corner somewhere? Load OS, set to reboot automatically in bios and voila...

pfSense is really great! And it offers a very nice feature all other firewall distris don't have: transparent mode with filtering.

But there's still a very good reason to use dedicated DSL/WLAN routers. The router box uses about 10W while the old PC takes 50+W. You could go for a Mini-ITX with an Atom CPU (20W) but it will be much more expensive.

Cheers
 madires

[T4P]

Router boxes uses ARM cpu's so yeah not much power that is needed anyway
I assume there's no need for FPU 

[westfw]

Running IOS on a home router? This is what we call overkill.

I miss the extensive raw data displays, debugging capabilities, and varied access lists.  I miss the ability to sting together small unix-like bits (notably, the access-lists) with orthogonal features to make sensible configurations.  I've been using DDWRT, and I keep wanting to do things that would have been easy in IOS.  ("So, which external hosts is this particular internal host accessing, anyway?")  Maybe I just haven't found the appropriate commands, since they tend to be real unix-isms hidden behind GUI menus...

Isn't that [cisco's policy] evil?

Probably, in fact almost certainly, it was merely stupid.

[gtsili]

ACLs are really very powerful but so are iptables/netfilter and even more so since there are more filters available than you can think of and even if the existing one does not suit you, you can develop your own. Both are a pain in the butt and the more experienced you are the easier and more versatile those tools become. If nothing else, the open source universe is flooded with raw data display functionality and programs as well as debug capabilities. You just have to dig a bit deeper.

There is however a huge trade off between cost of ownership, running cost, ease of use and manageability, richness of features, extensibility, heat dissipation and even space requirements and noise. I too want a huge data-center with top of the line telecommunications gear, a few petabyte of FC NAS and some supercomputers for good measure but I can't afford to buy that, even if it was a gift I couldn't power it up for long, it will take me a hell of a time to set it up, I will have to build a new house just to put them in and thinking about cooling it down and keeping it quite just gives me a headache. Worst of all, all that gear will be underutilized, it may be fancy and impressive but also a terrible waste of mater and energy.

I know that the above is a terrible exaggeration to the point of flame bait but this was not my intention. My point is that it is best to go for the optimal solution given a specific situation. So my solution at the moment is the ADSL router my ISP provides and a dual core Atom with a bunch of SATA drives that runs Linux and fulfills a big number of roles quite happily (Firewall, DHCP/BOOTP, DNS, NFS4, Samba, FTP, SSH, NTP, etc.).

A big issue I have omitted all together, is what someone, is comfortable using. If IOS is your cup of tea then all the arguments on the world can't change your mind and your are probably right. However, I would like to point out that: "When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail."

P.S. I have no intention of starting a flame or playing it smart to other people. This is my professional opinion and I stand by it quite passionately. I apologize if anything I wrote come out wrong.   

Running IOS on a home router? This is what we call overkill.

I miss the extensive raw data displays, debugging capabilities, and varied access lists.  I miss the ability to sting together small unix-like bits (notably, the access-lists) with orthogonal features to make sensible configurations.  I've been using DDWRT, and I keep wanting to do things that would have been easy in IOS.  ("So, which external hosts is this particular internal host accessing, anyway?")  Maybe I just haven't found the appropriate commands, since they tend to be real unix-isms hidden behind GUI menus...

[SeanB]

ADSL router the Telecom supplies here is just useless. Nice Billion wireless router ( i bought one myself) but it is crippled, WAN admin turned on, with default username and password ( same on all of them), remote update turned on and unable to turn off ( so the thing reflashses itself once a day and reboots) and unable to change any admin passwords, as they go right back to default. Only way to turn wireless off is to unscrew the antenna.

[westfw]

Oh, yeah, the real advantage of IOS was probably being able to pull a branch and add code to do whatever I wanted ("the ultimate debug capability"), which I can't do anymore anyway :-)  I guess I could do that with one of the OS distributions too, after a bit of a learning curve.

[HardBoot]

This why I ONLY run free software on my network equipment, no shady shit, if there's a security hole I can update from secure peer-reviewed servers.

Cisco is shit in every respect, price, usability, reliability, features. Noone good uses their hardware, only cert monkeys and corps run by the technically incompetent.

I've replaced a $1000 100Mbit Cisco switch with a $140 Gbit TP-Link switch and $60 Gbit wireless router running OpenWRT, faser and easy to use, soo cheap I could have parallel redundancy.