[aklug] Re: RouterBoard

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Christopher Howard
<christopher.howard@frigidcode.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:49:04 -0800
> William McKinney <wdmckinney@me.com> wrote:
>
>> Mikrotik has been around for a long time, and is quite proprietary.
>>
>> a.
>> http://askubuntu.com/questions/376717/how-to-set-up-a-linux-server-as-a-router
>> b. http://www.lartc.org/ c.http://www.zeroshell.org/
>> d. https://openwrt.org
>> e. http://www.freesco.org/
>
> Forgive me a touch of frustration... it is all nice and wonderful to
> be able to throw out a list of several of the dozen or two Linux
> router distros out there... but it would be more helpful if we could
> point to one or two of them that actually sold ready to go hardware,
> with software pre-installed, and transceiver modules ready to be
> plugged in, to meet your middle-sized business or enterprise needs.
>
> Say, I find out I am going to need 12 VLANs, with fiber trunks, and
> router-on-stick, and OSPF, and radius authentication, and ACLs, and
> port security, and config sharing, and neighbor discovery, etc.,
> etc... Personally, I'd like to be able to look at Web page that lists
> all the specs of the hardware, the prices, along with reassurances
> that the software is preinstalled, with all necessary drivers
> functioning, and the system has a straightforward and reasonably easy
> to master interface.

As much as I hate to say it ... if you need this level of
functionality, performance, ease-of-use, and hardware support ... then
I think that you're either better off going commercial, or you're
going to have to tinker at least a little bit.

Commercial doesn't have to be super-expensive. You might want to
check out the Ubiquiti stuff:

    http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax

They run a fork of Vyatta, and there appears to be some
cross-pollination among the projects:

    http://dotbalm.org/leaving-pfsense-for-vyos/

On the tinkering side, some of the stuff I know of (like pfSense) does
a lot of what you list above, but not all of it out of the box -
especially when you start looking for port security and neighbor
discovery. Concerns from the dotbalm.org guy about pfSense hardware
performance (because PF wasn't multi-threaded) will be addressed in
the next major release of pfSense.

> For a guy who is in the process of getting into the Net Tech field, it
> seems like we are really falling short in this area. If I'm wrong, I'd
> be glad to learn more about what's out there...
>
> (Somebody else mentioned VyOS... Again, if you can point me to the
> vendor site with hardware specs and prices, I'd be grateful.)

http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax#EdgeMAXhardware

VyOS is intended for people who want to build their own routers. They
could really use a 'supported hardware' wiki page or FAQ entry, but
these appear to be lacking. But the Ubiquiti stuff above looks good.

NB: I have no direct experience with any of the above other than
pfSense. I just did a few minutes of GTFY. ;-)

Royce
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Received on Tue Jun 24 21:23:17 2014