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!
Thank you, I did consider OpenWRT (thanks for the mention, I’ll add it to the post). Since OpenWRT is mostly considered a “router-first” OS, I didn’t think it would suit a switching-only landscape: but now that you mention it, OpenWRT should be able to run very well as a switch with plenty of L3 features. And it’s linux!
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll go read up on it a bit
theres a reason you wont find many L2 “software” its extremely inefficient and kills processors. Switches use purpose built hardware to be able to hit millions of I/Os without using a lot of power because of this. If you are trying to use a generic x86 processor for this, well you will have a bad time.
Hi, I’m not looking for L2 features - I’m specifically looking for software that is L3 or above. I would like to run said software on dedicated switching hardware. Unfortunately, OpenWRT does not seem to have builds for the newer Mikrotik devices.
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Thank you, I did consider OpenWRT (thanks for the mention, I’ll add it to the post). Since OpenWRT is mostly considered a “router-first” OS, I didn’t think it would suit a switching-only landscape: but now that you mention it, OpenWRT should be able to run very well as a switch with plenty of L3 features. And it’s linux!
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll go read up on it a bit
theres a reason you wont find many L2 “software” its extremely inefficient and kills processors. Switches use purpose built hardware to be able to hit millions of I/Os without using a lot of power because of this. If you are trying to use a generic x86 processor for this, well you will have a bad time.
Hi, I’m not looking for L2 features - I’m specifically looking for software that is L3 or above. I would like to run said software on dedicated switching hardware. Unfortunately, OpenWRT does not seem to have builds for the newer Mikrotik devices.
https://vyos.io/