Blog for hpHosts, and whatever else I feel like writing about ....

Friday 31 October 2008

Open source router, firewall and VPN?

Yep, apparently so. I've just came across this one whilst looking for new Linux distro's to download, and thought I'd mention it as I've not heard of it before.

It's name is Vyatta, and though it took a while to find it's download (the .com only provides the download via registration, you've got to go to the .org site to get the non-registration version), it's claimed;

Why use Vyatta?
Vyatta is a Linux-based router, firewall and VPN solution that can help you affordably build enterprise-class networks by delivering the performance, reliability and features of proprietary networking devices in an open-source package.

Vyatta can help you:

- Affordably scale large BGP implementations
- Attach your small office to the Internet
- Keep your network safe with a stateful-inspection firewall
- Securely connect remote offices with VPN
- Scale from DSL to 10-Gbps with a single software package
- Avoid costly proprietary networking upgrades
- Run virtualized networking environments in Xen and VMware
- Add networking and security to blade servers in your data center
- Offer network-based managed security services
- Add network redundancy regardless of vendor equipment
- Build your own best-of-breed Branch office solution

Vyatta Community and Vyatta Subscription Editions

There are two editions of Vyatta. One edition is for the Vyatta Community. The second is the Subscription Edition, often simply referred to as Vyatta. The differences between the two editions are as follows:

Vyatta Community Edition
  1. Available from Vyatta.com, Vyatta.org, SourceForge and others
  2. Access to bleeding edge development and stable community releases
  3. Support is best effort and community driven
  4. Use any hardware, including Vyatta Certified Hardware, but no hardware or performance guarantees
Vyatta Subscription Edition
  1. Available through Vyatta subscription packages
  2. Available preintegrated on Vyatta appliances
  3. Stable, tested, enterprise quality code
  4. Access to Vyatta knowledge-base
  5. Access to Vyatta University Training
  6. Backed by our professional support organization
  7. Vyatta Certified Hardware is tested and supported
Release Cycles

Most of the time, Vyatta operates on a two month rapid development cycle. This usually consists of a month of development and a month of QA. The end of code development is referred to as the Code Complete milestone. The end of the QA cycle marks the QA complete milestone. Typically, each milestone in the development cycle results in new packages being posted to the Vyatta repositories where users can update. New community ISO images are built at roughly six month intervals.

Vyatta License

Vyatta is an integration of a number of components from a variety of different sources, much the same way as a standard Linux distribution. Many of the components are licensed under the GNU GPL. Others carry a BSD license. All components carry licenses defined as open source.

License files are included with every package installed in the system and can be viewed in the /usr/share/doc/package/copyright file.


For 154MB, it looks pretty impressive. Though I'll obviously have to see how it plays once I've got it downloaded and running. In the meantime, you can get it yourself from;

Homepage:
http://www.vyatta.org

Download:
http://www.vyatta.org/downloads

Source Code:
http://www.vyatta.org/downloads/sourcecode

Step by Step Setup Guide
http://hostseries.com/vyatta-my-basic-setup-guide/

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