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!
If you want L3 features you want a router, not a switch. </pedantry>
I understand what you mean. Unfortunately, I need a switch to link different parts of my homelab together, and most routers on the market that I can run a custom OS on simply do not have the network backplane like dedicated switches. I was looking at Mikrotik’s offerings and whilst they have great hardware, there is no OpenWRT support for their newer models. Same with the TPLink ER series.
If something like a Qotom box had a dedicated switching controller and ports switched through hardware instead of me having to do it via software, I’d likely purchase one of those anyway
A number of their switches do run or dualboot RouterOS not just SwitchOS. Your performance at routing might be crap and it might make the performance of the L2 stuff be limited by the crap CPU, but it is possible, haha.