> Thanks muchly for the highly informative post! No problems Volker.
> Before going too much further , too make this a subject on track with > the group, I can tell you that a Mikrotik has a customised Linux > machine under the hood. ;-) > Network devices for home networking have never been OT here to my memory. > Low power and gigabit is an argument (no go with pfsense there), as long as computing power is available, which it isn't on any of the soekris boards and with limits on the alix boards, hence I never got myself one. > 64MB seems a bit puny though. Yes - it has the ability to do BGP but you won't be loading even a full domestic route table into this puppy. Good to learn BGP on only. Oh so much fun to try out protocols and configurations that would normally cost you several appendages. ;-) > That the mikrotik user interface is not worth its name is off-putting, but the K.O. would be this: It's not that it is bad; just organised VERY differently. ;-) > I generally use ssh to do things (the only thing you HAVE to use the > Windows util for is changing the default switch port grouping > arrangement to setup bonding or to arrange more standalone interfaces, > for instance as you will have no access to the unit if you want to > change the port you are connected too). > I am not going to start with any device requiring me to cripple myself just to get its basics configured. Yes - then again, almost all devices have the problem of how to connect to them when you are attempting to rearrange the LAN interface that you initially connect to them on. ;-) Pfsense lets you and gets around that issue with a handy serial-based shell. This thing has no serial ports. The USB port CAN NOT be configured as a serial interface which is also a little sad. How Mikrotik did it was to make their layer-2 based app (Winbox). (No Linux app which is somewhat annoying ). I personally think that a serial interface would be better and they do include them on their more professional products. The thing is designed for home networks though so most would not need or want to bond however being able to split up the initially switched interfaces to individual ports is RATHER handy. (Create DMZ network, for instance). > The acronym soup I can cope with if the documentation is good. It's quite good. Again, the wiki page seems to be laid out in an order differently than I would have but that's the device. Like the actual winbox (or web) interface, you WILL find what you are looking for...eventually. ;-) > VLANs are cool, but what do you use on the other side? Is there some small box that splits a VLAN up into say 3 or 4 ports again? You need a managed switch (or at least a VLAN aware one) as a normal switch will drop VLAN-tagged packets. Not a cheap option. I got mine through a work deal. Hence why the individually configurable ports on this thing are so handy. (You could then have up to 4 individual local area network addresses). > And no, mikrotik is not open source (though the Linux kernel will have to be), but the hardware includes the license and is much cheaper than alix & co. I don't mind so much as long as documentation is good, it does what I want and it's safe to use. They sell stand-lone > licenses for PC hardware too. Some fairly large ISP's use them as a their functionality/price ratio is awesome. Especially their larger units which have enough RAM to make all the cool features actually useable. Again, they have that one annoying limitation on setup (or if ssh or the web-based administrator fails) in that you will need the windows app to access the device. They do sell the software only for use on a PC and that would get rid of almost all the issues with it as you could use a serial interface to reconfigure the LAN ports. That immediately loses the low-power option though. :-( > Volker Brat. _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.canterbury.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
