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#floss #networking I need to replace a couple of old network switches.
Are there any companies doing open source switch hardware and software? I would like to tinker.
- 1U
- 12 or more10G fiber ports
- a couple of faster uplinks would be nice
- decent RESTish API or ansible support
Something like https://vyos.io #vyos seems suitable but it looks like I would have to diy my own hardware
@dch avoid anything that runs Cumulus Linux unless you want to pay NVidia a lot of money for Mellanox chips because they fucked over support of all the Broadcomm-based switches that were suddenly abandoned after Cumulus Linux 4.3.
@dch You might get decent results with something like an aftermarket Arista DCS-7050xxx series, but that'll be EOS out of the box. I did try to load a recent SONiC drop on one, and got nothing but pain. Factor in the overhead of splitter cables; that's a 40GBE port switch off the top of my head.
@dch Benjojo's teardown of ONIE on low-end capable Dells: https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dell-switch-hacking We've mentioned that ARMv7 support is a weak spot for FreeBSD itself at the moment. Targetting an x86 ONIE platform like HPE Alto or Supermicro might be better if someone wants to take it that far.
@dch unless things have changed, i highly recommend not using VyOS unless you want to pay $8k/year for an enterprise license. the company has a history of being very hostile to users of the open source version.
@lw wow that’s steep. If we had EVPN+VXLAN in FreeBSD that would be ideal.
@dch we do have vxlan, just not in a way that's useful for most of the use-cases you'd actually want it for (including EVPN) - it's designed around one vxlan interface per vxlan, like the old bridge.
i'm also not sure what you'd use for a control plane; BIRD doesn't seem to support EVPN, i think FRR does but it's kind of bad. OpenBGPD?
@lw BIRD has some EVPN work in a branch https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/bird/-/commits/evpn?ref_type=heads so I guess at some point that might turn up, but presumably this would also need support to be added to FreeBSD also.
I've not had enough general routing experience to know what I need here yet.
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