NSLU2 replacement?

[jackadaniel at gmail.com (Jack Daniel)]

Oh, my- two threads are colliding...

Remember that Untangle re-router thing I mentioned in the SOHO router
thread (and said to avoid)?  They have a virtual image of their "UTM"
(in quotes because a UTM w/o a firewall is not a UTM)- it runs in a VM
on a workstation, supposedly works fine from a USB drive.  Their
"network magic" is arp cache poisoning the LAN to redirect all traffic
through the workstation so they can do web or whatever filtering on a
non-perimeter system.  Using that as a starting point, someone clever
(and/or patient) enough might be able to build a pretty nefarious
little system.  It is built on Linux and other Open Source components,
so they want us to hack it, right?  Untangle.com

Jack


2009/3/8 Jim Halfpenny <jim.halfpenny at gmail.com>:
> Hi all,
> Here's a thought, instead of investing in hardware how about a drop-vm? The
> ideas would be along the lines of a U3 USB stick or optical medium which
> auto-installs a visualization platform and VM image, boots it up and maybe
> even makes to persistent following reboots of the host. The
> stick-drop-in-the-parking lot modality would work and rather than
> trojanising a PC (with the risk of detection by AV software) you get a
> small, fully-operational virtual host on the target network.
>
> I know this is a different strategy and obviously involves compromising a
> target PC but it appeals to the frugal side of my nature. There's no
> cross-compiling, no hardware costs (other than the payload medium) and the
> resulting platform would probably have more resource and better performance
> than most embedded devices.
>
> Know ye of such a project?
>
> Jim