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sporkman
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To SwOS or not? CRS312-4C+8XG

Thu Jul 15, 2021 3:18 am

I have a CRS312-4C+8XG that's simply being used for layer-2 stuff - we have a few hosts with 10gb/s interfaces and many with just 1gb/s. So this connects to a 10 gig port on a cisco 4948 and this is all just an internal network.

Is there any particular advantage to moving from the RouterOS option (which is what it shipped with) to SwitchOS? I have no firewall rules setup, no features turned on and disabled some of the features I clearly don't need in the "packages" config.

I don't see any issues with throughput as it is, I can easily max out the ports at 10gb/s with iperf.
 
tangent
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Re: To SwOS or not? CRS312-4C+8XG

Thu Jul 15, 2021 4:08 am

While you may use none of the "heavy" features of RouterOS (filtering, queueing, routing...) there's a bunch of ancillary stuff you may find helpful:

  1. A command line. I can tell you to give a command like "/system health gauges print" and you can give the results much more concisely than going through a pointy-clicky web UI. You can script management tasks like firmware upgrades through SSH, use RouterOS scripting to do repetitive stuff, and more.
  2. Set up minor services like NTP which would be tedious to stand up elsewhere. A local NTP server means all your site devices are sync'd to each other, and you aren't subject to the often slow performance of the public NTP pools.
  3. The overlapping feature sets of SwOS and RouterOS are incomplete. A given feature in SwOS often has a more powerful expression in RouterOS, so you're giving up power by using SwOS instead. Some examples:
    • The ingress bandwidth limiting feature of SwOS — which I've often found useful to prevent some low-spec device from getting spammed off the net — exists in RouterOS, but you also have IP queueing and other means of doing the same thing with more power.
    • The LAG feature in SwOS only exposes the switch's LACP feature. Via RouterOS, you have many more configuration options.
    • The last time I counted, there were four ways of getting the basic effect of what SwOS calls "port isolation" under RouterOS, each with different tradeoffs.
  4. Both OSes have IGMP snooping, but only RouterOS lets you run an IGMP querier to pinch off abandoned streams.

The one advantage of SwOS is that an untrained cable monkey can learn to run it properly much more quickly than they can learn RouterOS, if they can do so at all.
 
sporkman
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Re: To SwOS or not? CRS312-4C+8XG

Thu Jul 15, 2021 6:13 am

Wow, no CLI? OK, I'm sold on keeping RouterOS then.

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