On Sat, 14 Jun 2014 06:46:57 Andrew McGlashan wrote:
For 3G and 4G services, I usually recommend a dedicated modem/router device that supports Mobile Broadband using a USB stick -- for instance a box running ROOTer [1] (a version of DD-WRT), will be much easier to use than trying to get the 3G/4G modem stick operational directly on a Linux box.
It's been some years since I used such a 3G/4G modem, since Android 2.3 came out with Wifi AP support I haven't had a need for it. But when I used such things I never had any problem. I used my 3G modem on multiple laptops and workstations while tracking Debian/Unstable.
Besides, I am of the view that the public IP (or carrier grade NAT IP), should not be public facing directly on equipment that /may/ have any kind of vulnerable component -- that is especially true for Windows boxes, but it is also true for other OS (including Mac OS X) and of course Linux.
While that's a reasonable point in concept it doesn't seem to apply well here. If you use a major distribution like Debian you can easily apply security patches and the number of people maintaining it ensures that bugs generally get fixed quickly. If you use a distribution with a smaller user base and few developers bugs might not get fixed as quickly. It seems to me that there are two approaches one could take with regard to a firewall box. One is to run the same distribution as your workstations so you are good at managing it. The other is to run a different distribution in the hope that both distributions don't have the same bug, EG you could run Debian on your desktop and CentOS on your firewall. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/