Re: Meraki

[Ray Soucy <rps () maine edu>]

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

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 :-)

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.

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/


On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 6:47 PM, SilverTip257 <silvertip257 () gmail com>wrote:

> Date: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 09:32:10 -0500
> > From: Ray Soucy <rps () maine edu>
> > To: Rob Seastrom <rs () seastrom com>
> >
> > Cc: NANOG <nanog () nanog org>
> > Subject: Re: Meraki
> > Message-ID:
> >         <
> > CALFTrnPpBQLHRRDkMnt1nz8Wi0k3B6KEmt9tbgNS-wfRHqSnqQ () mail gmail com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> >
> >
> > It looks like Brocade has swapped out Quagga with IP Infusion's non-free
> > version, ZebOS.  They also decided to abandon the FOSS Vyatta Core
> > project.
>
> A number of years back it was interesting to see Vyatta switch from XORP
> [0] to Quagga.  I found out quite a while after they made the move.
>
> Bummer.
> This move by Brocade is unfortunate.
>
>
> > It's really unfortunate, as the FOSS project is the only reason I was
> > interested in paying the licensing.  It was attractive to have Vyatta Core
> > as a no-cost option for small things, and the subscription edition for
> > higher visibility devices.  Now that they've moved away from having any
> > FOSS project, I'm not really inclined to invest in the product, I'm sure
> > there are others who feel the same way.
>
>
> > There is a group of people who were active in the Vyatta community trying
> > to get a fork of it going under the name VyOS, http://www.vyos.net/
>
>
> Thanks for pointing out VyOS.
>
>
> > As far as Ubiquiti, it looks like about 2 years ago they actually hired a
> > few people from Vyatta, Inc. to work on EdgeOS.  So development of EdgeOS
> > has continued [and likely will continue] independently, though it looks
> > like at least a few people from UBNT are interested in seeing VyOS happen
> > and participating on their own time.  I know one of the early goals for
> > VyOS is to get the documentation up on their Wiki and have a release of
> > the
> > current Vyatta Core with the name swapped out as a starting point.
>
> For those of you that purchased EdgeRouter Lite (ERLite-3) [2] units
> recently, do they come in plastic enclosure or the steel enclosure like the
> EdgeRouter PoE (ERPoe-5) [3] units?  We got a few of each in at the office
> at different times (first ERL and later ERPoe).  Just curious.
>
> I guess I'm spoiled ... I like the metal case much better than the plastic
> ones.  Once I saw the case of the PoE model and saw the new pictures [4]
> for the ERL on Ubiquiti's site I've been holding out purchasing an ERL for
> my home.  I should bug our distributor, but I doubt they'd know since they
> aren't opening the boxes prior to shipment.
>
> Although a commercial alternative, Mikrotik hardware (ex: RB750GL [1]) and
> OS is attractive.  It appears all Mikrotik "integrated solutions" include
> some sort of enclosure (see www.routerboard.com).  The CLI takes some
> getting used to, but the syntax makes sense after a while. ;)  There's also
> a webui called webfig and a Windows client called Winbox.
>
>
> > I really hope the VyOS project can get off the ground.  If any developers
> > familiar with maintaining Debian-based distributions are on-list, I know
> > the project is looking for people to help.
> +1
> I hope VyOS project succeeds.
>
>
> [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XORP
> [1] http://routerboard.com/RB750GL
> [2]
> http://www.ubnt.com/media/product/edgemax/hardware-overview/edgerouter-lite-1.jpg
> [3]
> http://www.ubnt.com/media/product/edgemax/hardware-overview/edgerouter-poe-1.jpg
> [4] http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax#EdgeMAXhardware
>
> --
> ---~~.~~---
> Mike
> //  SilverTip257  //



-- 
Ray Patrick Soucy
Network Engineer
University of Maine System

T: 207-561-3526
F: 207-561-3531

MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network
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