I noticed there isn’t a general topic about the CRS309 switch yet. I installed one in my home this week and couldn’t be happier with it! I made a video about it so everyone can have a good look and it also includes some shots from the insides of the switch. If anyone has any questions, let me (us?) know!
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First tip I can share, but this basically goes for any Mikrotik product, set flow control of each port to “auto”. By default it’s set to none but it’s better to have flow-control enabled when available!
Second tip, but again this goes for most Mikrotik product, once you take it out of the box and hook it up, update it to the at that moment current stable version!
Can you turn this device into a NetFlow probe that plugs into a SPAN port on a switch ?
Most of my L3 switches can only do sFlow and it doesn’t really do a great job when it comes to inspecting east/west traffic for botware/malware/suspect traffic etc.
Have you tried using the device as a transparent shaper ? I have somewhat unique situations where I have small sites where I have a AirFiber L2 handoff and a mixture of radios/fiber handoffs to the site from there. Each port usually requires its own set of shaping parameters etc. I know CPU on these CRS’s are not super beefy , but if I can shape 30/50/100 Mbit a port I can see them getting some usage at some of my sites.
I tried to look into this and enable Traffic Flow real quick but as I have it setup everything flows through the hardware chip only so I won’t see anything, so I couldn’t get it to really work.
Performance wise for a CRS the Dual-Core 800Mhz ARM is actually pretty powerful, more powerful than other routerboards have been before it at least. Still, I haven’t done many tests with it yet either (I’ll try a bit later!) but I imagine it being able to do more then 1Gbps NAT so maybe it can do a few hundred Mbits of traffic queuing too. I’ll setup a test for this.
–update
I did some more small tests
I wasn’t able to remove my ports from the bridge (my network would collapse) but I set two ports to use the bridge without hardware and disabled fast forward, doing L2 through the CPU I would see about 30% utilization while doing 1Gbps, so that’s pretty good. I wasn’t able to test what speed the interface to the CPU can handle, but at least 1Gbps going through it.
I did try to test with some filter rules and queues but couldn’t make that work while tinkering (ran out of time). At one point I did manage to have it tag (packet mark) all traffic to one interface and then used iperf to saturate it and it would fluctuate between 500Mbit and 800Mbit with one core pegged at 100%. Still, with the ports out of the hardware bridge I imagined I would be able to use simple queues but that wasn’t the case, most have overlooked something.
So routing and L2 wise the CPU seems pretty capable and packet marking up to 500Mbit also isn’t bad.
[quote=TimothySlerb post_id=720053 time=1552197746 user_id=139733]
I know the difference between good and bad stick/buttons. Hell, you can feel it.
What is the difference between good and low-to-mid PCB?
[/quote]
The references I made during the video about the PCB where mostly about the layout. I do some PCB layout myself and can quickly see if things where thought through or that someone just slapped everything on a board and hopes that it works. PCB had a very clean layout and I always appreciate that.
I have a CRS309-1G-8S+IN that I think I am going to have to return.
It was working fine for about two weeks and then it seems to have stopped working. As I am sure you all know, normally when you turn on the model it will take a few seconds to boot, flash its LEDs momentarily and will sound a chime. This one will no longer do any of that. Apply power and it will light up all LEDs, all of which stay on with the exception of the PDE/Boot Eth port which eventually turns off unless an Ethernet cable is plugged in. SFP+ 5 doesn’t have the 10G LED lit but user and power LED remain lit. There are no chimes when attempting to boot.
So basically one day it was all lit-up and wasn’t passing any network traffic.
I’m trying to troubleshoot it now but it is unresponsive to the Reset pinhole button. What I find disturbing is it just started doing this on its own after two weeks of normal use. If it had been prompted by a firmware update or user error then it would make more sense but that wasn’t the case.
For what its worth it was running RouterOS v6.43.4 IIRC and a password was set. The IP address was set / static. Firmware updates were set to manual so I know it wasn’t an auto update that somehow went wrong. It could be a fluke I guess.
I’m within the return windows so I guess if all else fails I can do that but I would like to know what the root of this was.
