publication croisée depuis : https://lemmy.world/post/448925

Hi there, I was looking for combinations of switching hardware and open source switching software. Stratum and Cumulus Linux caught my attention, but these seem to be focussed towards the industry and would likely be very difficult to run in a homelab. I’m not going to touch the likes of Ubiquity, but as of now the only choice seems to be closed-source software from TPLink and/or Cisco. I’m going to try and harden the inside of my network too with ACLs and any other features I find on the switches, and having an open source OS with regular updates would be very nice to have.

Any suggestions? I was trying to find something to run on a MikroTik switch, since I find their L2 OS a bit lacking.

Cheers!

Edit: a kind user mentioned OpenWRT, which I should have looked into more seriously before posting this. I’m going through it right now, any suggestions are welcome!

  • fruitywelsh@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 year ago

    Stratum, Cumulus, Vyos, openwrt, and pfsense are all the most router focused options I can think of. You also have options of just using Network Manager (NM) to do static routes, and network bonding, and using FRRouting for more advanced routing options.

    Personally, on the lower level stuff like network bonding and such, I prefer the NM over trying to do the same things on openwrt so far. Just hard to beat Redhat Docs on a lot of things that are more “enterprise” like. I haven’t had any reason to mess with the others, though. My research had Vyos as the more powerful option compared to pfsense, and some feature of cumulus like supporting Multichassis Link Aggregation Groups (MLAG) are really cool, and something I’d like to play with more.

    • MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thank you, I did consider OpenWRT (thanks for the mention, I’ll add it to the post). Since OpenWRT is mostly considered a “router-first” OS, I didn’t think it would suit a switching-only landscape: but now that you mention it, OpenWRT should be able to run very well as a switch with plenty of L3 features. And it’s linux!

      Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll go read up on it a bit

      • Unwanted8765@lemmy.world
        5·
        1 year ago

        theres a reason you wont find many L2 “software” its extremely inefficient and kills processors. Switches use purpose built hardware to be able to hit millions of I/Os without using a lot of power because of this. If you are trying to use a generic x86 processor for this, well you will have a bad time.

  • Zoë@lemmy.mlM
    1·
    1 year ago

    Please do add a tag to your post as stated on the sublemmy sidebar! Thank you. :)