[Discuss] iGuardian "enterprise-grade" home router

[Richard Pieri]

On 9/12/2014 6:44 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> You'll have to clarify what "embedded" means to you, and how that would
> differ from pfSense running on appliance hardware.

How do you go about updating the OS?

With an embedded OS you back up your settings, restart the device in a
special run mode, write out an image to local storage, restart in the
normal run mode, and restore your settings. Some update mechanisms
perform the settings backup and restore automatically; some don't. If
something goes wrong then you have a brick. Recovering from a bricked
state can be difficult. It may require special tools (software and
hardware); it may require opening the device and performing physical
changes.

With a "live" OS you run a tool to install updated programs, typically
using some kind of package management system. Restarting is rarely
required. If something goes wrong then the update tools usually can roll
back to the previous state. In a worst case scenario you can restart the
system in an administrative mode and manually correct the problem or
manually roll back to a previous state.

m0n0wall is an example of the former; pfSense is an example of the latter.

-- 
Rich P.