Both specs for MicroTik and Ubiquiti EdgerouterX are much inferior to BPI-R2 Pro, for example EdgerouterX (currently out of stock) only supports 256MB RAM while the latter can support up to 4GB RAM.
Another is that I believe RPI-R2 can support the mainline Linux kernel with normal distributions (e.g. Ubuntu), do MikroTik and EdgerouterX support that as well in addition to OpenWRT?
Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?
Does BPI-R2 actually supports those distributions, or rather those distributions "can run" on that hardware? That's a difference. OpenWRT can be run on Mikrotik, yet Mikrotik doesn't support that. OpenBSD runs on Edgerouter, yet I doubt they support that. Will anyone that I will buy BPI-R2 from, fix my "normal distribution" if it fails to detect some hardware, or with a failed upgrade?
It's an awesome device but I think we are confusing a few important things here. Like the word "support" for a start.
Broadly speaking, I would not rely too much on support from manufacturers but rather by the communities when the projects are stable enough. Manufacturers have the tendency to slow or halt support in a few years because it costs them money, or to push newer products, while communities support usually lasts much longer.
For example, the NanoPi NEO Core official images all still use a 4.14 kernel (2017-2018), while the ones at Armbian use the current mainline 5.10.
> Are additional RAM gigabytes anything important for a switch? Especially one that delivers on the parameters?
For a switch, probably not. But it does open up a bunch of possibilities for some constrained environments.
I would use such a thing combined with a few other services aside from pure network switching. Off the top of my head, I'm thinking running pi-hole and Home Assistant.
Why? Because I live in a studio apartment, and it would be a single, small and quiet box. I'm currently doing this on a mini-ITX J3455, and while the setup is broadly OK, I'd love to be able to remove the switch I have lying around. Also, the integrated Realtek controllers suck, and I can't replace them with anything better (there's no PCIe port).
Of course, your other points absolutely matter, and are the reason why I'm still looking around for quiet x86 machines that I could expand.
I didn't quite determine if you have a solution or are looking for a solution, but a Raspberry Pi 4, 4GB with a passive fanless heatsink case can run Pi-Hole and Home Assistant without breaking a sweat. I use a FLIRC case.
I also want to do some routing on a gigabit link, so the RPI doesn't scratch that itch. I'm also not comfortable with the various horror stories I've heard about SD cards dying in Pis (although I've run one with home assistant for several years with no issues).
I'd also like to avoid running external drives, the goal being to have a self-contained unit. I'd rather have a larger unit instead of multiple small ones that require cabling (mostly for esthetic reasons) and various dongles.
Glad to hear this. I went checking [0], and there's still a speed bump for me: mine is the PoE version, and its switch ports are not supported yet. The PoE version is also an orphan with respect to OpenWRT.
If switch and PoE support can be worked out, that may a way forward for my router.
Yup. There's a lot of hardware offloading going on inside when running the stock firmware. Something like this board, or a dual-NIC mini-PC, and a surplus PoE switch, might be a better choice.
It won’t help with switching, but it is good for routing/fw + running real software.
I just run a Netgate appliance for that plus something less flaky than OpenWRT.
I also wonder what actual speeds you can get out of these NICs. So many cheap gigabit NICs aren’t really up to the task. And I’d guess that the switch plane runs at 1 gigabit total here.
Edgerouters run Debian, and you can install Linux or even BSD on them. But they have very slow CPUs and use a specialised NPU to handle forwarding of traffic, so if you do not run their OS its going to be very slow. This is the cheapest model, but the lite version can handle over a million packets per second, which requires a beefy CPU.
This! Having been down the home-rolled router rathole several times with PFSense etc, you often need a vastly more powerful generic CPU to match the performance of the dedicated NPUs in even entry-level dedicated networking gear, something I don't think people starting out at this often realize. This is why Ubiquiti and co get away with seemingly absurdly low RAM/CPU specs on devices like the Dream Machines etc.
I'd also remind anyone considering this that your family will probably not thank you for any outages you introduce to their browsing. My LAN is something that has to "just work" all the time and home-brew solutions will often require you to do more update/maintenance tasks than an off the shelf Mikrotik/Ubiquiti/<enterprise style vendor> solution.
You can still add neat features to your network like VPNs, PiHole, encrypted DNS, etc etc without replacing the core router or switch - I use a device much like this Banana Pi to run those services in some containers alongside my <enterprise style vendor> router/switch- I get all the cool new features I want; family get an internet connection that's always on and "just works" thanks to me not having to maintain the core router.
I am running Mikrotik hAP AC aka MikroTik RouterBOARD RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT using OpenWRT on the home network with 700..900Mbps speeds already. Mikrotik has hardware switching and OpenWRT can use it.
Both of which are a similar price point, and include a case by default.