router Advice on 1G/10G Router (Not AP)

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, brwainer said:

Vyatta is an operating system that is custom built for switching and routing. It's a bit like PFSense but with a lot less features, and more switch focused than routing focused. At least that's my understanding of it. My only experience is a single lab in college where we used a few virtual vyatta switches in our GNS3 network.

It was actually primarily made as a router OS. It's now VyOS since Brocade acquired it and basically let it die from no development so being open source the community stepped in.

[leadeater]

3 minutes ago, Windspeed36 said:

Haven't tried running DDWRT on it - as a budget SMB router, it'll be fine - you won't need the options that seperate it from a Fortigate or similar.

@qwazwak It's probably best I clarify that FortiGate is a firewall appliance not a router, it has routing functions, so it's not really fair to compare them. Totally different use case and design purpose. The only reason we're talking about it now is because I run a lab at home and try to replicate everything that I would be doing on the job so I put in a FortiGate. Because of the low comparative cost and reduced set of features I required at my friends place I went with a ERLite 3 since even if it didn't work out it's only 1/8th the cost of even the most basic FortiGate that is fully featured, those things quite literally go in to the cost of houses.

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

@qwazwak It's probably best I clarify that FortiGate is a firewall appliance not a router, it has routing functions, so it's not really fair to compare them. Totally different use case and design purpose. The only reason we're talking about it now is because I run a lab at home and try to replicate everything that I would be doing on the job so I put in a FortiGate. Because of the low comparative cost and reduced set of features I required at my friends place I went with a ERLite 3 since even if it didn't work out it's only 1/8th the cost of even the most basic FortiGate that is fully featured, those things quite literally go in to the cost of houses.

Yeah I probably should have been clearer on that.

[qwazwak]

On 6/6/2016 at 7:08 PM, Windspeed36 said:

 

Pretty much what @brwainer wrote - it's a linux based routing OS however since it was bought out by Brocade it stopped being developed. Vyos exists as a community version and is open source.

Haven't tried running DDWRT on it - as a budget SMB router, it'll be fine - you won't need the options that seperate it from a Fortigate or similar.

Ah, okay.

 

On 6/6/2016 at 7:08 PM, Windspeed36 said:

As for switching, you can probably settle with a dumb layer 2 switch that isn't managed - Netgear, Cisco (Linksys), DLink - they're all pretty much the same. If you're looking at L3 managed that's a different story. If you wanna learn, see if you can pickup a cheap 2960x - keep in mind it's entirely CLI to do anything though.

 

What do different layers mean?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, qwazwak said:

What do different layers mean?

The layers refer to the OSI model outlined below. Switches operate at layer 2 based on frames with MAC addresses. Routers operate at layer 3 with IP packets and IP addressses. The chart below shows more detail. If you want to know more, ask away.