OpenBSD Journal

OpenBSD mentioned in Forbes; specifically LoK Airlok...

Contributed by sean on from the openbsd and pf for fun AND profit dept.

Joshua writes:

Lok's solution:Put everything in one slim box, using one or two AMD chips to power everything, a custom chip for security and unified software with a point-and-click design for easy setup. Lok uses off-the-shelf parts and OpenBSD, a free version of Unix. The smallest Airlok supports up to 300 concurrent users and costs $3,000 versus $20,000 if a WISP buys all the features separately. A larger Airlok, for 5,000 users, costs $20,000 and does the work of seven devices costing $120,000.The biggest Airlok supports 50,000 users and costs $70,000 versus $500,000 or more for equivalent separate devices.

Read the full article here

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (65.190.56.4) on

    come on....


    I am all for openbsd but making these ridiculous claims about these alternative costs are a bit much. I do not doubt it is a nice box, but good lord. Wake me when it's over.

    Comments

    1. By Bert (216.175.250.42) thrashbluegrass at antisocial dot com on

      My guess is that they priced cisco equipment with a seperate box for each function. Not technically accurate, but "good enough" for the tech reporter on a deadline.

      Comments

      1. By Erik Carlseen (68.6.193.220) on

        Something about news articles in general (as I learned from one of my clients, a PR agency) - many "reporters" create "stories" by basically doing some light editing (if that) on a press release. If you want to get your product or service in a newspaper, magazine, etc., the best thing to do is to have a pre-written piece that the "reporter" can slap their name on.

        This is the actual main reason for many people's complaints that news sources lean too far left or right or whatever - much of the "news" is generated by PR firms, advocacy groups, political parties, etc., given a very thin coat of paint, and slapped on the page.

        Some actual work is done on the editorial page, and in the reviews (although there have been some "reviews" done along these lines for things like restaurants - caveat emptor), but by and large you should take most newspaper and magazine stories with an appropriate grain of salt (unless you have a particularly high level of confidence in a specific writer or publication).

        Interesting to see something from Daniel Lyons (the writer of this article) that does something other than waste a few columns ranting about how Open Source products are nothing but hippie trash. I usually have to worry about spraining my eyes by rolling them too much when reading his tripe.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (62.227.100.87) on

    How much of their profits will they donate to the project?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (213.23.141.168) on

      GOOD QUESTION, INDEED !!!

    2. By Iain (142.179.199.27) on

      Question should be, how can LoK's vested interest be made to support the OpenBSD Project?

      Ideas on this are:
      1. Get LoK to support the effort in opening up more hardware manufacturers to Open Interface Documentation.

      2. If their is a particular hardware configuration they need for their product line. Then have them support a small project to add the Kernel Interfaces to use that hardware configuration. This could be by donation of the hardware and direct funding of a project.

      3. Get their product certified. If security then get the product its Common Criteria EAL designation.

      4. Donate to the project beyond hardware. Either cash donation or a sub-project donation.

      Key is that LoK gets a return on their investment and helps their product line.

      IK

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Coward (69.148.111.41) on

        Question should be, how can LoK's vested interest be made to support the OpenBSD Project?

        OpenBSD.org::"The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system."

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (70.20.155.102) on

          "Question should be, how can LoK's vested interest be made to support the OpenBSD Project? OpenBSD.org::"The OpenBSD project produces a FREE, multi-platform 4.4BSD-based UNIX-like operating system."" Unfortunatly the FREE part...he is totally right. Why should they support the project, because they have what they already wanted. It sucks but expecting kickbacks because people use openbsd's FREE software is really stupid.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (62.227.122.202) on

            not expect, just apreciate.

  3. By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on

    it's not uncommon for businesses to have a different box for each task - even when one box can perform more than one task.
    Cisco gear is expensive - I personally see no reason to discount the accuracy of these numbers.

    As both an OBSD advocate AND cisco engineer, I have to say I would probably stick with the seperate boxes (assuming $$ is not an issue) as I dont like to put all my eggs in one basket. If $$ were an issue, I would certainly look at this product.

    It's a shame when someone innovates (or elevates an existing product - namely Obsd) and all people here can do is *attempt* to find fault with it, or more sadly, find fault with a Forbes article. Get a Life.

    and for the Anonymous Coward at 62.227.100.87, what are you, the Openbsd project's conscience?

    Comments

    1. By phessler (64.173.147.27) on

      its a legitimate question. LoK is profiting at least partially off of the hard work of the OpenBSD group. yes, openbsd is freely avaliable to anyone for any reason (including baby mulching equipment), but common courtesy would be to give a few bucks back. of course, LoK is also free to not give any money.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on

        That's why this is BSD'ed, and not GPL'ed. more freedom.
        thanks for making my point.

        Comments

        1. By Chris (24.76.170.207) on

          Would you rather everyone sat around going "ooh, that's so nice!"? Yeah, that'll be an interesting conversation.

          C'mon, the fact that it's posted here is a positive statement in its own right, so people are going to discuss the drawbacks and ask questions.

          And as is mentioned time and again on the mailing lists, few corporate interests that use OpenBSD/OpenSSH in their products give much back to the project.

          Comments

          1. By Anonymous Coward (80.108.115.184) on

            IAWTP mostly. But: Whoever uses (Open)BSD in their product simply does not have to give anything back at all. Of course, it is nice if they do - but it is not "unnice", it's not "evil" if they don't. That's what the license says.

            I.e. encourage people/enterprises who do give back - but at least in my opinion you do not have the right to demand anything from firms which don't. Of course you can ask them do give back...

            Regards

            Comments

            1. By Chris (24.76.170.207) on

              I agree. No one is obligated to give back which is what I like so much about BSD. I also think it's reasonable for people to complain when people who do quite well with BSD don't give anything back. And that's what people are going to talk about... "that's so neat!" only goes so far, and people like to chatter so you often end up with negative comments and debate, but if you were to ask people what they think about this, most people would probably say it's good.

      2. By Anonymous Coward (68.40.14.28) on

        Lok Technology is listed in the same column above Peter Hessler on the donations page - http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html
        So is Simon Lok.

        Doesn't mean they've donated more than once, but at least donating is on their mind.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (65.190.56.4) on

      I am also a cisco engineer, and from the article it shows 2 instances of router prices:


      under the general replacement it is $20,000

      in the article an engineer replaced 2 routers est $70,000 with 2 LOK boxes, to do the same thing(I assume same thing means hsrp replacement?).


      Since these LOK boxen only have FE/GE interfaces, those are some mighty expensive similar cisco routers. $35000 for 2 ethernet interface cisco router.


      To say the least, interesting numbers.

      What sort of pps can this LOK server really handle? I'm guessing only a fraction of what a $35000 cisco router could, considering I can build a sup720 with gig for less than $35000.

      Again, I am a BIG fan of openbsd, but information like this makes me wonder.

      Comments

      1. By Anonymous Bastard (12.33.195.201) on

        I dont memorize numbers, but considering IOS is based on BSD anyway (at least it was at one point), i'm guessing thoroughput to be close for closely matched hardware.
        i can't imagine a "PC" configuration that could come close to a sup720 which supports as many FE/GE ports as a 65xx/75xx might. (but i dont have a great imagination anyway)

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (65.190.56.4) on

          right, I think it would be close of hardware was similar. But thats the thing, its not even close. I am no hardware engineer but I think you are limited by bus speed of ethernet interface (PCI for example), among a few other things. These routing and switching companies have spent years building hardware to do these things and do them well. Again, I am no hardware engineer so someone with more clue please step in.

        2. By Cunt Breath (66.39.191.242) on

          IOS was NEVER based on ANY BSD source code. In fact, IOS does use some of Linus Torvalds' malloc source code, but it was placed in the public domain before he was interested in the GPL. Juniper is the one who uses (Free) BSD as their base OS.

  4. By Anonymous Coward (65.190.56.4) on

    Looks like they have a link on how to config xp clients for their server: http://www.air-lok.com/support/winxp_ipsecvpn.pdf Is it safe to assume LOK is using a standard obsd ipsec setup? If I had obsd and tweaked isakmpd would this howto pdf work as well? If I recall the mailing list always has people asking about obsd and xp interoperability. Maybe this is it? Thanks in advance!

    Comments

  5. By Anonymous Coward (212.35.109.211) on

    Since when does OpenBSD even gets through the boot process with that amount of ram? Last time I tried a box with 6GB of ram it just paniced during boot (xeon emt64 whatever - using the AMD64 kernel).

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (198.110.83.98) on

      em64t is different enough from amd64 that it probably doesn't work yet.

      Comments

      1. By tedu (68.122.124.221) on

        or you could be completely wrong and it's worked fine for a quite some time.

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (212.35.109.211) on

          That's true, my IBM x336 box booted an AMD64 kernel no problem - after I downgraded it to 3GB of ram.

  7. By Anonymous Coward (12.171.182.91) on

    Saw this in entrepreneur mag... http://www.entrepreneur.com/Magazines/Copy_of_MA_SegArticle/0,4453,320910,00.html Here's a snippet... Although his first line didn't take off, Lok used input from those first customers to fashion Airlok, which combines security and network management functions normally associated with separate firewalls, routers and authentication servers. Lok Technology now has 12 employees and about $1 million in 2004 sales. It hopes to at least double that number in 2005 by selling Airlok directly to wireless ISPs while inking manufacturing contracts for the technology with larger networking vendors interested in producing volume editions under their own brands. At press time, several such deals were in the works.

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