GUI decisions for 'uberwrt'.

[Dave Taht]

I have a small window within which I can make some big changes to the
uberwrt/cerowrt/bismark/wisp6/iscwrt router concepts. Probably the
most invasive and difficult one is settling on a gui that we can stick
with for a very long time, a year, at least, for our testing.

I'd like to get feedback by june 15th.

The choice of a gui is not relevant to the real purpose of these
projects, which is first and foremost, get advanced debloating
concepts tested.

But people like guis to configure routers.

Let me say at the outset that I don't.

I use ssh almost exclusively, and in flashing, configuring, and
playing with the increasing numbers of routers at my command I
actually use pdsh more often than not. And guis waste space I'd rather
use for things like snmp, strongswan, collectd, etc.

Now... very high on my list is getting a kvm version going that will
make it easier to fiddle with bloat problems (with netem to simulate
latencies, for example) without having to flash and reflash routers
and then configure them, over and over again. A kvm might be useful
for gui development, too.

I actually built a kvm version of 'cerowrt' a while back, but my
laptop doesn't do kvm, so I have not taken the time to find a machine
I could actually test it on. Would love someone to play with that and
give feedback as to what would be useful to have in a kvm machine
simulating a router... or better, supply a working build. or vmware.
or something virtualizable...

Anyway, moving on...

The feedback from nearly everyone in the field is that Xwrt is an
interface that only a hacker would love. OK, guilty as charged,
although I note I've got most of this feedback back from people that
have already been warped by^H^H^H^H^H^H exposed to openwrt's or
dd-wrt's interface.

Yesterday I built a version of cerowrt with the luci web interface for
the wndr3700. Naturally it has bugs, some more than the xWrt version,
some less (notably it seems to support better firewall syntax).

http://huchra.bufferbloat.net/~cerowrt/

cerowrt-dbg contains a luci version, cerowrt  a Xwrt version. The
other distros are all Xwrt and I haven't got around to testing the
kvm, buffalo, or guruplug builds yet. (hint, hint)

I note that the primary reason I chose xwrt in the first place was
because it was fast and written in shell, which I grok. luci is slow
and written in lua, which I don't.

Kind of key to making a gui decision is that I do not have time to
work on it myself *at all*, and whoever wins will have to volunteer or
line up someone(s) to feed back the debloating lower level work into
the gui. Otherwise I'm perfectly happy sticking with xwrt for the next
year. Or longer. And let those making commercial products make them
prettier.

So out there are xwrt, luci, gargoyle, and dd-wrt.

Votes? Thoughts? More detailed discussion?

I would like to commit to something and worry about it no longer by
june 15, as changing out a gui in the field requires a complete
reflash and reconfigure from scratch.

-- 
Dave Täht
SKYPE: davetaht
US Tel: 1-239-829-5608
http://the-edge.blogspot.com