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and it's cheap and fully customized, and powerful
For me when building homelab, customizability maybe important
MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything. For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it. I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had b…
There is no contract with MikroTik. You buy the hardware, that's it. The software and updates are free.
Just use linux! Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could truly own your router? It's a great educational experience I would recommend to anyone interested in networking. Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.
> Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway. The problem with this (assuming you meant a generic (x86?) system) is that you won't get wire speed processing (no hardware offloading), so network performance will suffer. Unless you buy a dedicated router board (which is typically ARM), like say something like the Banana Pi BPI-R4. But installing/configuring a standard distro line Debia…
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You can actually ditch the GUI and go to the command line with OpenWrt and do custom/weird/power-user stuff to your heart's content.
Well, yes. But I can do that with a nice UI in Mikrotik. Other things: switch port management and bridging, proxy ARP, and so on.
Not sure what you mean about bridging either.
I've never had a use for proxy ARP so wouldn't know, but I do know it's possible to enable it. If not on the GUI, at least on the CLI.
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> Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway. The problem with this (assuming you meant a generic (x86?) system) is that you won't get wire speed processing (no hardware offloading), so network performance will suffer. Unless you buy a dedicated router board (which is typically ARM), like say something like the Banana Pi BPI-R4. But installing/configuring a standard distro line Debia…
from my brief search: real-world OPNsense (yea, that's not Debian) benchmarks show that even low-power Xeon-D (Skylake-D SoC) with 10G SFP+ NICs: pushed 9.40 Gbps in plain router mode 7 Gbps with packet filtering and no rules 7 Gbps in NAT mode 5.5 Gbps with a default ruleset
MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything. For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it. I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had b…
> cannot wait for the contract to expire There is no contract with MikroTik. You buy the hardware, that's it. The software and updates are free.
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I'm not disagreeing but they are quite powerful and fanless, with generous networking ports and both RAM and SSD can be upgraded. I haven't been able to find many other devices that tick so many boxes. These seem to exist on a class of their own.
Yep, and I can't disagree with that either, they know their niche (and know they're niche) and are catering to it. Having said that, mikrotik hardware running OpenWRT feels like something that might scratch one of my itches.
The idea is to run OpenWRT passing through the ISP NIC and one (or both) of the SFP+ ones going to the switch, and also run other services in isolated containers.
I'm even thinking about putting Home Assistant on a VM on it but I'm not sure yet what impact it will have on routing performance so that's on hold for now.
It's so much more powerful than what I need for the router/firewall that it should be comfortable to run quite a few things on it, and I can start moving them off it to other devices if Internet speeds catch up to it in the future.
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CRS is the switch product line and you would not believe how many professional network engineers do exactly as you have suggested and installed a CRS and asked why it locks up when routing.
I really would question any "professional" network engineer that can't tell the difference between a switch and a router... https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in Each of the mikrotik switches even comes with a block diagram linked on its product page, showing for instance a single 1.3 Gbps between its L2 switch chip and its CPU. https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/product_files/CRS305-1G-...