Mikrotik SwOS for CRS112-8P-4S-IN

SwOS
1

Hello there, I have just bought a new Mikrotik SwOS for CRS112-8P-4S-IN smart switch. But it comes with RouterOS and I want it to be in SwOS as per my requirement. Could anybody help me which SwOS firmware i must have to reload for this on my CRS switch? Any help on this will be appreciated a lot. Thanks.

2

CRS1XX/2XX are RoS devices, not SwOS.

3

Okay! Got it. But i mean to say that can’t I upload SwOS instead of RoS on this routerboard? Thanks.

4

No, you can’t.

5

Okay! i disappointed to know this as i thought all Mikrotik smart switches come with SwOS operating system. Totally waste my money on this. Thanks.

6

There are 3 families of Mikrotik switches:

  • CSS: that run SwOS
  • CRS1XX/2XX: that run RoS
  • CRS3XX: that allow dual-boot (you can choose what os to run) - except for CRS354 for which there is no SwOS yet.

Anyway, why is that such a problem?
Everything that can be configured in SwOS can be configured in RoS as well (but not the other way around).

7

Thanks for keep supporting. I know RoS has more configuration features than SwOS, but some features i didn’t get in RoS what i see with SwOS such as port isolation, port forwarding, port locking, port mirroring, bandwidth limit etc. Thanks.

8

All is there, in switch menu, with far more possibilities to fine-tune, than in SwOS.
CRS1XX/2XX is even more “powerful” in this field, than CRS3XX that runs RoS.
But that comes at it’s own price (literally too) - but mainly it’s the complexity of configuration.

Here are some example configurations:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CRS1xx/2xx_series_switches_examples
And more info:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CRS1xx/2xx_series_switches

9

Yes! I completely agreed with you. Also, thanks a lot for providing links to know more about CRS1xx series switches and its configurations. I really appreciated your assistance on this to me. Have a great time.

10

Huge dissapoinment as in Mikrotik page (https://mikrotik.com/product/crs112_8p_4s_in) is is clearly showing: “Operating System RouterOS / SwitchOS”

11

The page for crs112-8g is correct. Looks like the page for the crs112-8p needs to be fixed.

12

…because you get more functionality??

I get that the SwOS web UI is a little more “one click fix” than WebFig in RouterOS, but the functionality of SwOS is all there, plus more. Let’s take the incorrect list of “missing” features up-thread:


  • port isolation: you can do this several ways in RouterOS:
  • port forwarding: that’s part of destination NAT
  • port locking: there are several ways to accomplish this in RouterOS:
    • use RouterOS’s “dot1x” feature to do strong authentication rather than participate in the security-through-obscurity that is MAC filtering; MACs are easily spoofed
    • use the Bridge → Filters (or IP → Firewall) rules to define which MACs are allowed to appear, either at the whole-bridge level or at the per-port level, depending on whether you want to give the client freedom to move to different ports; note that this latter isn’t even an option with SwOS port locking
    • set the ARP setting on the bridge to “reply only”, then under IP → ARP click “Make Static” on the MAC to IP mappings you want to keep, and delete the rest; manually add others in the future as they’re allowed; MACs not on the static ARP list cannot communicate to or through this router
  • port mirroring: it’s right there; alternately, if the reason you were wanting mirroring is to do things like packet sniffing on a PC, you can use RouterOS tools like Torch to do this monitoring on-device
  • bandwidth limit: many of MikroTik’s switches (including this thread’s CRS112) offer QoS traffic shaping, which is essentially the same thing as SwOS’s ingress rate limiting. RouterOS also offers customizable queueing that’s so much more powerful that MikroTik has a whole certification program for it, the MTCTCE.

I highly doubt there’s anything SwOS can do that RouterOS cannot.

13

Thanks for pointing this out, the product page is now corrected.