What managed switch are you using, and why? Are there open source alternatives, or even open hardware switches?

  • @stevestevesteve
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    11 year ago

    At home I use opnsense for firewalling, and behind that I have a mixture of switches:

    • smallbusiness cisco switch (not to be confused with enterprisey cisco switches)
    • Unifi switches
    • TP-link switches
    • Force10 switches.
    • Dell switches

    Frankly, I’ve had good luck with anything except for the tp-link. unifi tends to oversimplify in their ui IMHO (e.g. there’s no manual LAG settings, you get LACP only), and I trust pretty much all of them fairly well except for the tp-link. I know a lot of folks use other smallbusiness/homeoffice switches (netgear, tplink, etc) and frankly I stay away from them as much as i can nowadays.

    There are some open source switching firmwares and opensource virtualized switching. To get there you need to be willing to make some serious sacrifices, though, in budget, performance, flexibility, and power bill…