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Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

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Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#31

Post by AceJohnny2 »

gonzo wrote: post #21
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not the target market. You shouldn't be making an analogy with a Veyron, which remains a luxury car for an individual. You should rather be comparing it with a firetruck, a vehicle custom-built for a purpose you as an individual you will never need. I currently work in the network hardware industry (think Cisco, Juniper, etc). Our boxes sell in the 6-figure price range, each [1]. We sell to your ISP, wireless…

> Individual chips used in the hardware can cost multiple thousands of dollars each. and 10 years ago, the compute power of a QC i7 would have tens of thousands of dollars.

Right, but we don't care about past chips. Moore's law applies to the whole market at the same time, so today's special network chips are still much better at what they do than today's general-purpose chips.

It's kind of stupid to say that today's general-purpose hardware can do what yesterday's special hardware could do at a faction of the cost, because the specialist market has also moved on and wants the performance of today's special hardware.

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#32

Post by gh02t »

ay wrote: post #28
gh02t wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wanted something in the category you're describing and after shopping around a bit I stumbled across Mikrotik's products. I bought one of their 24 port smart switches and it was exactly what I was looking for. Not a lot more expensive than some of the nicer consumer-targeted gear, but it has way more functionality. http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-IN

Thanks for the link! Is it fanless too ? the 15W consumption seems to hint it could be, but the datasheet does not mention it.

There are no fans.

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#33

Post by gh02t »

mmastrac wrote: post #29
gh02t wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wanted something in the category you're describing and after shopping around a bit I stumbled across Mikrotik's products. I bought one of their 24 port smart switches and it was exactly what I was looking for. Not a lot more expensive than some of the nicer consumer-targeted gear, but it has way more functionality. http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-IN

That's the exact one I have. It's definitely not a "plug and play" router, but I love it. My only real beef is that most everything on it requires a much larger level of network administration knowledge than any other hardware. I'm also scared that I'm going to open up my home intranet to the world every time I tweak some of the advanced settings. Not trying to dissuade anyone from using them, but it's light years aw…

Yeah, it definitely isn't something I'd recommend for people who don't know what they are doing. It's feature set is more comparable to enterprise hardware like Cisco or Juniper. Their terminal configuration utilities are pretty easy to use, but I actually really like their webui. It exposes all the functionality (which is a daunting amount) but is clean and very responsive.

That said, RouterOS pretty well documented and isn't hard as long as you know the basics. Mikrotik actually has a pretty vibrant little community around their wiki.

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#34

Post by seanc722 »

GeorgeBeech wrote: post #30
korethr wrote: post #19

This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…

The 2960 series has 8 and 24 port models, that are fully managed switchs - VLANs, management, anything that you can do in the IP Base IOS. See the bottom of this page for models the 24 and 8 switches are what you are looking for. http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/switches/catalyst-2960... Also, if you want a cheaper options the Dell Basic switches are fully managed and have just about any feature you could want.…

Got a used 24 port 2960 on ebay 10/100 ports for ~$65. Maybe doesn't mean the "open" portion, but the rest is definitely satisfied. Also, bought it 5~ years ago and still runs beautifully (Noisy fan though).

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#35

Post by hamburglar »

gdooraccess wrote: post #10

Does anyone know which team in FB is building software for these products? I did glance FB company info but could not get the information.

The only datapoint I have is that it's in the SF bay area, since I am acquainted with someone who got poached from Amazon specifically to work on this and had to relocate from Seattle to there.

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#36

Post by nl »

mmastrac wrote: post #29
gh02t wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wanted something in the category you're describing and after shopping around a bit I stumbled across Mikrotik's products. I bought one of their 24 port smart switches and it was exactly what I was looking for. Not a lot more expensive than some of the nicer consumer-targeted gear, but it has way more functionality. http://routerboard.com/CRS125-24G-1S-IN

That's the exact one I have. It's definitely not a "plug and play" router, but I love it. My only real beef is that most everything on it requires a much larger level of network administration knowledge than any other hardware. I'm also scared that I'm going to open up my home intranet to the world every time I tweak some of the advanced settings. Not trying to dissuade anyone from using them, but it's light years aw…

Can the firewall on that do outbound filtering?

I've been looking at trying to control some of my devices a bit more (eg, SmartTVs).

PFSense looks good, but the dedicated hardware boxes are kinda pricy[1], and I don't really want to build something myself.

A switch with a built in firewall at that price is an interesting option.

[1] http://store.pfsense.org/hardware/

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#37

Post by ericd »

gonzo wrote: post #20
rsync wrote: post #3

I very much want to transition to open hardware models for networking gear - for both my own home use and for rsync.net. However, at no single site (especially my home) do I need a 6U chassis full of switch ports. Is there a 1U version of this on the horizon ?

You probably don't need 16 40Gbps channels at home, either.

Heh maybe not need, but want? I definitely want.

Looks like a 40 GbE NIC is just $500: http://www.amazon.com/MELLANOX-CONNECTX-3-56GBE-1PORT-MCX313...

Just need an SSD RAID to feed it...

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#38

Post by gh02t »

nl wrote: post #36
mmastrac wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the exact one I have. It's definitely not a "plug and play" router, but I love it. My only real beef is that most everything on it requires a much larger level of network administration knowledge than any other hardware. I'm also scared that I'm going to open up my home intranet to the world every time I tweak some of the advanced settings. Not trying to dissuade anyone from using them, but it's light years aw…

Can the firewall on that do outbound filtering? I've been looking at trying to control some of my devices a bit more (eg, SmartTVs). PFSense looks good, but the dedicated hardware boxes are kinda pricy[1], and I don't really want to build something myself. A switch with a built in firewall at that price is an interesting option. [1] http://store.pfsense.org/hardware/

Yeah it can. The firewall is standard iptables, so you can do whatever you want. It's also got DNS, http cache, SOCKS proxy and approximately 1 trillion other things that you may find handy as an all-in-one home/small business network device. Needless to say, it's maybe not the best idea security-wise to run all that stuff on one device, but I'm not terribly concerned.

I've heard people say it's not really powerful enough CPU wise to cope with a ton of rules (>hundreds), but I have a fairly involved firewall config on mine and it's no trouble.

Funny story, we use a firewall rule to punish roommates for not doing their share of the chores. If they get too far overdue on chores, we have an iptables rule to randomly drop a certain percentage of packets to their machine.

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#39

Post by actaeon169 »

rsync wrote: post #3

I very much want to transition to open hardware models for networking gear - for both my own home use and for rsync.net. However, at no single site (especially my home) do I need a 6U chassis full of switch ports. Is there a 1U version of this on the horizon ?

http://onie.org/

For example:

http://www.edge-core.com/ProdDtl.asp?sno=425&AS4600-54T

or

http://www.edge-core.com/ProdDtl.asp?sno=423&AS5600-52X

Re: Introducing “6-pack”: the first open hardware modular switch

#40

Post by brk »

korethr wrote: post #19

This is rather cool, and I'm glad to see some work being done in the networking gear space utilizing open designs and firmware like this. Unfortunately, unless I find myself needing to network a datacenter in the near future, it's not immediately useful to me. That said, I do hope other developments in network gear that will be useful in other markets emerge from this effort. From my perspective, there's a gap in net…

There are some good cheap managed switches out there. I have a Linksys SFE2000-something 24 port PoE switch for my PoE devices (security cams, IP phone, other stuff) and a TP-Link [something] 16 port switch. Both support basic VLANs, SNMP, etc.

I have 1 2port VLAN that connects my cable modem to my router on the TP-Link. From that switch I have 1 port cables to a machine with wireshark, and I can configure that port to monitor various VLANs for whatever reason.

I run MRTG for several things, including basic traffic graphing. I display the graphs from the router uplink port and a couple of other key ports in a window on the VMS that also has security cameras on it. From that monitor I can keep on eye on key things (cameras, Internet I/O, some home automation stuff).

Anyway, I haven't found an affordable "perfect" switch for home stuff, but there are a lot of cheap, decent managed switches that give you a lot more flexibility beyond "everything on 1 network".

My home net is essentially segmented into Primary LAN, Security Devices, Guest LAN (mostly just a wifi bridge) and LAB LAN.

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