The power of Linux

I was talking to a coworker who mentioned that netscreen has the ability to do VPN fail-overs, which means that if the VPN connection goes down, it will try to establish another VPN to another point of entry on the target network. He was talking about how cool it was, and that it was previously only available through one company, and they reqired thousands of dollars of equipment, and support to set it up. But now, it was available on semi-low-end netscreens, which was cool. I was suprised. I told him I could write a VPN fail-over script in 7 minutes on any of our linux gateways at customer sites. He was suprised.

This is the power of Linux, it's the power of total control. If you choose proprietary hardware (and software) then you are limited by those things. But If you have total control over a system. You can do almost anything.

You just need to think it up and it can be done.

If someone approached me and said, Wouldn't it be cool if when one VPN went down, the box could automatically establish another VPN to another point of entry on the target network??? I would have said, Hmm... that's an interesting idea, let me get back to you in 7 minutes... and voila! VPN failover is born!

Granted, not all of these solutions are easy... The afformentioned box that cost thousands of dollars and provided VPN failover also proformed load-balancing... that's a little bit more complicated to program in linux... BUT it can be done with diligance!

Computers stop being scary and stupid, and buggy, when you figure out how to tell them exactly what to do.

Because when you tell them what to do... They DO IT.

You just gotta speak their language, and when you can talk to them, and ask them to do all the piddly little shit that you don't want to do, or never had the time to do, or couldn't think quickly enough to do, or couldn't devote enough time to do, you'll realize that computers are kinda cool...