Things to do with cheap network boxes

Idea list. What can you do with cheap, single-purpose Linux boxes?

Router

Linux boxes make very flexible routers. Obviously they can route Ethernet and serial lines (PPP and SLIP). ISA or PCI cards for modems, ISDN, and T1/Fractional T1 are available.

Network Address Translation. IP Masq can hide a network behind a single IP address. IP port forwarding can tunnel ports from that outside address to particular machines on the inside.

Transparent port redirection. It's possible to divert all TCP connections headed for, say, port 80 to a caching Web proxy.  Someone may eventually hack IP Masq up to do the same thing that Cisco's LocalDirector load balancing box does.

VPN. CIPE (url later) seems to be getting good press; other people are running PPP tunneled over ssh connections.

Network sniffer

Incredibly useful tool for analyzing and debugging complex applications, especially ones that aren't documented very well.

Console

Multi-session vt100, either over telnet or serial ports.

X terminals are the original thin client. There's not enough storage on a single floppy to cram in an X server and window management, but you could go to bigger local storage like an LS-120, or NFS-mount

I suspect that a VNC (url later) client could be even thinner.

Print server

I bet you can run an lpd/samba print spooler (does there have to be enough local disk/ramdisk for the whole queue?) on one of these boxes; you could use ghostscript as a rasterizer if you had additional storage for fonts etc, possibly on NFS.

Protocol translation

Import NFS, export SMB, Netware. Maybe AppleShare; I forget the rules for which of these you can do. Will look it up.

Cache

Cache HTTP.  Cache DNS.  Cache FTP?

Jay Carlson -- nop@nop.com

Last updated Feb 15, 1999; prices and availability last checked Feb 14, 1999.