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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

The coolest hardware in the cheap router/APs that run OpenWRT is the programmable Ethernet switch. VLANs on such cheap hardware is an awesome tool to split up stuff at the ethernet level without having to have a bunch of NICs. This doesn't seem to have it. Does anyone know of a 5 or 10 port cheap switch that also has programmable VLANs? Those would be great for homelab kinds of uses.

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The usual suspects have cheap low-end switches:

https://store.ui.com/us/en/pro/category/all-switching/produc...

https://mikrotik.com/product/RB260GS

If you want a serious switch, you can often find a big name used switch for $100 or even less. eBay has a couple of 12-port Ruckus switches listed right now, for example.

Oddly, if you want to purchase a license to enable the fancier capabilities of Ruckus switches (those “12 port” 1Gbps switches actually have two 10Gbps ports), it’s surprisingly awkward to find anyone selling the licenses to individual users. On the other hand, the documentation quite strongly suggests that there is no verification whatsoever if you simply tell the switch that you have the appropriate license.

(I assume that there are a few things going on here. First, big users who buy tens or hundreds of these switches will have accounts and will actually pay for licenses as needed and presumably get decent pricing. Small users are basically irrelevant to the manufacturer’s bottom line. And serious users will regularly use in a configuration in which they don’t have Internet access, and will quite sensibly refuse to purchase the switch if it needs Internet access.)

(Whoops, the campus network is down because the core switch needs to re-validate its license. But it can’t re-validate its license because it can’t access the Internet until after it starts working again. Better choose a new vendor next time!)

But do they run FOSS software? And can they thus be trusted? Lots of network gear gets zero day'd and exploited. I can understand the sentiment of wanting to run something that can potentially be fixed and fixed quickly.

Running FOSS software on a switch is an awkward endeavor. Some switches have okay-to-decent support, mostly via OpenWRT, and you’re mostly getting VLAN control. With Ruckus or Cisco, etc, you also get ACLs, some “layer 3” capabilities, sFlow, SNMP, real support for various loop detection schemes, network mapping capabilities, possible diagnosis of cable problems, and lots more. And a configuration system that is quite a bit better than you will find in most Linux networking config software. (Although OpenWRT actually tries pretty well, in contrast to, say, Ubuntu. Sigh.)

I would not want to run a large network using OpenWRT switches. Maybe if OpenWRT took management of multiple devices seriously some day.

FWIW, in theory you can run a mostly-open Linux stack on some of the very software-defined switches, supporting OpenFlow and such. See, for example, https://github.com/sonic-net/SONiC/wiki This did not seem like an easy thing to get working.

I really wanted to get whitebox switches for my lab. There is very limited switch model support out there and almost none of the supported models are suitable for home use. No one needs a $6000 100gbe switch for their home lab. I need an 8 port 10gbe switch or a 48 port 1gbe poe switch and you will not find support for those types of switches from the white box operating systems. Whitebox switching is for datacenter and hyperscaler sdn. It’s not like building a whitebox nas or rolling your own bsd router.

There’s really only two managed switch options for the homelab in my opinion. Mikrotik or, if you don’t mind loud noise and higher power consumption, used enterprise gear e.g. cisco.

I’ve migrated all my network stuff to vyos routers on used sophos boxes, and mikrotik switches. The switches do nothing besides vlans and mc-lag. Vyos is great and supports everything I need like wan load balancing, vrrp, bgp ecmp, dhcp, dns forwarding.

FWIW, at least some of the small- and medium-size Ruckus switches are fanless or can be set to run in a mostly fanless mode. Doing the latter may limit the available PoE output.

Also, eBay is coming up with plenty of reasonably priced Dell -ON switches and some very very cheap EdgeCore gear, but they might be old models and don’t appear on the Pica8 hardware compatibility list. Sigh.

I stand corrected, looks like you can get some of those dell switches for a couple hundred bucks, haven't looked at the market in a couple years. To me the biggest thing mikrotik offers that no one else seems to is small reasonably priced 10gbe switches. I don't need a 48 port sfp+ switch, I need two 12 port ones with mc-lag for my ceph/k8s cluster.

This has been one of the most rewarding comment threads on HN I've read in a long while. Lots of learning even for me in terms of what the current state of things is in terms of cost and choice.

I've used a couple of these $30 8 port managed switches https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00K4DS5KU/ another commenter mentioned for various things and been pleased. This is fanless, cloudless, and has web-interface configurable VLANs, LAGs, mirroring, jumbo frames, IGMP, and STP.

You can use a managed switch to get this working if you have a router with too few ports.

I have several gl.inet routers running openwrt but they all have 2/3 ports total. I put a TL-SG108E in front of them and use that to tag ports.

This particular switch has an interface that is quite easy to reverse engineer, so I have written a script that allows me to easily move ports between VLANs without bothering with the unintuitive web UI.

The Zyxel GS1900 series switches run OpenWrt well and like can do VLANs. You can an, 8, 10, or 16-port one for less than $100 on eBAY. The GS1900-10HP has 8 GigE ports with POE and 2 SFP ports and I'm seeing it on eBay for around $60 right now.

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