On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Ray Soucy <r...@maine.edu> wrote: > Can confirm the current ER Lite is a plastic enclosure. > But for $ 100 I can definitely look past that. >
At that price point I'm not complaining. However I do have a preference. ;) And I do think that the metal cases are a better design - sturdier and likely better heat dissipation. > > Also, most of the UBNT distributers seem to be very knowledgeable about > the product line, so I'm sure they would know if you asked them :-) > Our rep had to do some digging... He managed to tell me that the ERLite now has a metal case. He did not tell me whether they have any with metal enclosures. But that's probably hard for them to say though. > > We've been running XORP internally for about 100+ CPE devices (actually > the ones we were looking at Vyatta as a replacement for). In the end I > think that moving to Quagga was a good thing for Vyatta as XORP doesn't > have a very active developer community. XORP releases since 1.6 have been a > forked code base that eventually became XORP 1.8. It's very touchy, and > requires quite a bit of operational experience to know what will cause it > to crash and what won't. The big thing you get with XORP that you don't > with Quagga is multicast routing, and a more active community. I've been > really interested in BIRD [0] as well, but haven't had a chance to try it > out. > > BIRD is on my list too. > Back to UBNT, though. The ER makes use of a lot of non-free code (not so > great), but it's to facilitate hardware acceleration (very nice). A lot of > functionality for IPv4 and IPv6 are both implemented in hardware, including > not just forwarding and NAT, but also regex matching for DPI. It's how > they can get so much PPS for such a modest piece of hardware. I believe > the chips they use are from Cavium [1], but I could be mistaken. > > [0]. http://bird.network.cz/ > [1]. http://www.cavium.com/ > > Thanks for the informative discussion, Ray! And others :) -- ---~~.~~--- Mike // SilverTip257 //