nanog mailing list archives

Re: Meraki


From: SilverTip257 <silvertip257 () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:13:03 -0500

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Ray Soucy <rps () maine edu> wrote:

Can confirm the current ER Lite is a plastic enclosure.
But for $ 100 I can definitely look past that.


At that price point I'm not complaining.
However I do have a preference. ;)
And I do think that the metal cases are a better design - sturdier and
likely better heat dissipation.



Also, most of the UBNT distributers seem to be very knowledgeable about
the product line, so I'm sure they would know if you asked them :-)


Our rep had to do some digging...

He managed to tell me that the ERLite now has a metal case.  He did not
tell me whether they have any with metal enclosures.  But that's probably
hard for them to say though.



We've been running XORP internally for about 100+ CPE devices (actually
the ones we were looking at Vyatta as a replacement for).  In the end I
think that moving to Quagga was a good thing for Vyatta as XORP doesn't
have a very active developer community. XORP releases since 1.6 have been a
forked code base that eventually became XORP 1.8.  It's very touchy, and
requires quite a bit of operational experience to know what will cause it
to crash and what won't.  The big thing you get with XORP that you don't
with Quagga is multicast routing, and a more active community.  I've been
really interested in BIRD [0] as well, but haven't had a chance to try it
out.


BIRD is on my list too.


Back to UBNT, though.  The ER makes use of a lot of non-free code (not so
great), but it's to facilitate hardware acceleration (very nice).  A lot of
functionality for IPv4 and IPv6 are both implemented in hardware, including
not just forwarding and NAT, but also regex matching for DPI.  It's how
they can get so much PPS for such a modest piece of hardware.  I believe
the chips they use are from Cavium [1], but I could be mistaken.

[0]. http://bird.network.cz/
[1]. http://www.cavium.com/


Thanks for the informative discussion, Ray!   And others :)

-- 
---~~.~~---
Mike
//  SilverTip257  //


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