Re: Running NetBSD on Netgear appliances

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> 1.) The Linux on the DG834G does its job which is only forwarding packets
>    between the LAN to the firewall and the DSL line reliably.
>
>   [I'm less convinced about the ability of Netgear applicances to provide
>    reliable NAT. We had some problems when using two different Netgears
>    routers for testing IPSec NAT-T. But I don't need that at home
>    fortunately.]

I'm behind some Netgear right now, and I too think that its NAT has 
problems - I can only have 1 outgoing TCP-connection (ssh, web), if I 
start another one the first one hangs or gets dropped. Ethereal made me 
believe the router messes up sequence number and retransmits and all sort 
of fun happen (as far as I can debug from here, which is not much).

Model seems to be a FVS318 Cable/DSL ProSafe VPN Firewall.


> 2.) The sources which Netgear provides to be GPL compliant are completely
>    undocumented. I couldn't even figure out how you are supposed to
>    compile them to get a firmware image.

If thet don't provid the neede Makefiles etc., that's a violation of the 
GPL, see #3:

``The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for
making modifications to it.  For an executable work, complete source
code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any
associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to
control compilation and installation of the executable.''


  - Hubert