The Open Source Advocate

For those of you who don't know, Vyatta is an open source network appliance that functions as a router, firewall, and VPN device, all running on a customized version of Debian Linux . I have been following the progress of Vyatta for over a year now, and things are looking very promising. The latest release is called VC4 (Vyatta Community edition) and it includes a bunch of useful new features: New command shell allows you to modify Linux settings and network settings from one common interface Redesign of routing protocol offers greatly improved stability and performance Role-based user access Equal-cost multi-path routing Remote access VPN Support for IP tunneling protocols PPPoE support, commonly used with DSL connections WAN load balancing of outbound traffic across two or more WAN-facing interfaces Quality of Service policies provide congestion management and traffic conditioning As you can see, a lot of exciting changes have been made in the short six months since the previ...

Yesterday we held a release party in Salt Lake City, Utah to celebrate the release of several open source operating systems. The original announcement only mentioned Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Fedora 9 , but we realized during the party that OpenBSD 4.3 was released on May 1st. We were all happy to celebrate the goodness of open source, without arguing over which distro was better. The Fedora guys showed us some cool improvements, and the Ubuntu guys also demonstrated some neat improvements. The great thing about open source is that all of these improvements will be shared by both distributions in a future release. I want to say thank you to our excellent sponsors who made this party a success. First, the amazing location was provided by the web-development company Code Greene . Second, the delicious Chipotle burritos were donated by the Utah Open Source Foundation , ran by Clint Savage . Lastly, thanks to the Fedora project who contributed funds, and Ubuntu/Canonical who contributed...