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Help! We need to pick a platform for our desert adventure

Hypervisor or none? Which OS? And DNS or cloud for content filters?

Things have slowed down a bit in our efforts to build a super network-groomer for the remote Australian community of Willowra, because there's been a changing of the guard at the Wirliyajarrayi Learning Centre.

While we wait for new staff to arrive and to help us out with some ping tests and better photos of the network cabinet, we've turned our mind to configuring the appliance we hope to build. We've already decided to use an Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC) after deciding their small size, low weight and decent grunt make them a fine platform for the job.

So the question now becomes what to run on them.

Our aim is to build a device that can do some WAN optimisation, perform and/or assist with caching and content filtering, and also fill the role of a WSUS server so that patches only need to be downloaded once.

Whenever we write about Willowra, commentards weigh in with “whatever you do, don't even think of Windows” comments.

We like that thinking because the likes of Nitrobit offer a WSUS alternative and run on Linux. So we could probably do without Windows. Which means we could probably also do without a hypervisor.

But a bare metal hypervisor could still be a handy idea, because we've got a few jobs for our box to do and a bit of separation between them could come in handy for reliability purposes. We know our WSUS replacement, for example, will only run at full throttle every so often. Dialling it down looks a useful idea given the constraints of the NUC.

So a box running ESXi, and lightweight VMs for Nitrobit (or equivalent), Squid (for caching) and a WANop virtual appliance seems nice.

We're also pondering whether the appliance should drive the WiFi, thanks to something like the OpenWRT Linux distro for embedded devices.

And then there's the content filter. Doing that on-site would likely mean more downloads, which is not desirable. The current rig relies on a third-party filter that makes for a poor users experience and introduces some extra router hops. Using a family-friendly DNS service is one alternative, but to make that work we'd need to reconfigure clients to make sure local DNS settings can't override the network gateway.

Enough of our yakking: what do you think about our thinking? We are, after all, journos first and sysadmins a distant second. Hit the comments and tell us where we're going right or wrong, and feel free to toss in some suggestions for different approaches. ®

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