homelab

I'm currently running pfsense, and then mikrotik and ubiquiti switched and ubiquiti AP's. I'm slowly removing the ubiquiti switches and moving to mikrotik as I'm upgrading to 10gbe. Mikrotik switches have a reputation of being reliable, capable, and cheap-ish. So far I like them. While I love ubiquiti's single pane of glass approach with the unifi controller, I wanted to get away from that a bit. I work in IT, and most things I encounter don't have that... And are configured via cli and or web interface. When I built my home network I jumped into ubiquiti for the ease. Now I'm back tracking for more learning.

I might cop some flack but I use Cisco, they’re rock solid, last for years and just work with minimal issues and I’ve not run into problems with hardware under performing or firmware bugs like I have on others.

That said, Ubiquiti makes fantastic hardware, I believe Mikrotik does too.

You can absolutely buy open hardware that allows you to install custom switching OS; Dell and Mellanox make them as do many other manufacturers (I think even Facebook has a hardware switch, not that I’d buy it lol). One of the more common OS to install on them is Cumulus Linux and a lot of these use “spine leaf” topologies.