On Sat, 2012-10-13 at 17:33 -0400, Fred Goldstein wrote: > I do get your point, that RouterOS was optimized for routing; there's > just nothing else that fits its price points and form factors > (especially outdoor Routerboards), so even if it's a little > inefficient, it may still be cost-effective for some traffic > levels.
Specifically, it fits well at the edge (customer edge). I have some clients who use RouterOS in a similar way to what you are describing for that purpose. For example, one client is running RouterOS as the head end device in a few buildings he manages. He is able to combine the routing capability in RouterOS with it's VLAN capability and deliver some quality services to tenants in the building. Throughout the buildings, he has either switches (mostly Cisco switches) or more Routerboards (some are X86 systems instead) to manage traffic flows. The problem with these devices is really centered around management rather than functionality. Cisco, for example, has some really nice tools that can do some routing of vlan traffic at the switch layer, whereas Mikrotik has to be statically configured for this. It is not too hard to build the redundant routes and just use STP or RSTP to provide the failover in these building networks, but on a large scale, this can be rather difficult and daunting. > The discussion began with questions about multiple NATs and > routing within a network; I'd expect the VLAN configurations to get > at least as much throughput as full-scale routing. It won't compete > with Ciena but their boxes don't cost $100 and run on 6 watts. Bear in mind that with RouterOS is actually faster in bridge than in routing. Really, that is true of ALL Linux devices. Because you are not needing to do a lot of traffic management, you can probably afford to turn off connection tracking on the Routerboard devices, which can save an impressive amount of CPU and latency. As for multiple NAT, I will just say that I am not a fan of NAT in any way, other than at the customer edge. In my networks, I always provided my customers with one or more public IP addresses. If they wanted more, I could deliver more, but it was behind a router. Customer layer2 traffic belongs to them and I always kept it there. -- ******************************************************************** * Butch Evans * Professional Network Consultation * * http://www.butchevans.com/ * Network Engineering * * http://store.wispgear.net/ * Wired or Wireless Networks * * http://blog.butchevans.com/ * ImageStream, Mikrotik and MORE! * * NOTE THE NEW PHONE NUMBER: 702-537-0979 * ******************************************************************** _______________________________________________ Wireless mailing list Wireless@wispa.org http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
