hello all.

after a recent arp attack i had happen on my LAN i was advised to use a routerboard as a fancy "Cisco" switch.
the idea of course is to monitor traffic via torch or any other means... although still somewhat a bit of a new area to me and after searching i figured out its a simple procedure of disabling all functions on the router and just adding the ports to a bridge and that's it.
i've gone farther as to assigning one of the ports an ip address so i can log into the router and watch the traffic.

now i obviously want to get the one with the most ports so i was considering the rb493G since all ports all gigabit.

1) lets be honest here. how close can i make this device into a cisco switch?
2) is the rb493g overkill? i am not finding any boards with lots of ports and are gigabit.
3) is this really a good idea?

My opinion: If you need a switch, buy a switch.

My opinion: If you need a switch, buy a switch.

i want to make the routerboard into a switch so i can use it somewhat like a cisco.
cisco switches are very very expensive.

So buy a cheaper switch and don't buy Cisco. "Somewhat like a Cisco" is an incredibly vague statement.

The switch chips inside routerboards aren't very capable. They have nowhere near to even close to the functionality of a Cisco switch, so you should buy a switch that fits your budget and has the features you need.

A Dell 2816 is $347 and has 16 ports, which compares nicely to 9 ports for $200 in a 493G. There's plenty of other brands in that price range.

Though picking up on your original comment: "ARP attack" is vague. Are you looking to implement something like dynamic ARP inspection, which is a Cisco layer 2 security feature? You can't do that with a 493G. Can't do that with the Dell, either. You're going to have to pay for advanced features like that, because switching has to happen at wire speed, and making hard ware that can do complicated logic at wire speed reliably is expensive.

You may also be interested in this thread: http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52286