Hardware

Home Router Update

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Quick update on the state of play with the router.

After the Dell server was phenomenally loud when running I had decided not to make the move over however some deep googling and checking through the Dell forums turned up that there were BIOS releases that addressed this problem. With the combination of the new BIOS and turning all the power settings onto custom and opting for power saver the server has quietened down now to what I would class as below acceptable levels.

Project CHR is back on track! I’m hoping that this weekend I can get the copper to fibre converter in so I can get the CHR spun up and routing as my main router.

Home Router Upgrade

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It’s been a busy day or 2 for me getting parts together and getting ready for a fairly big shift around my home network environment. It’s all being done in the name of education as I want to run a CHR as my border router to give me some real horsepower for some scripting I’m looking at trying to do.

As part of the move around I will end up removing a MikroTik RB3011, HP N54L and a PoE injector and will be swapping over onto an RB260GSP (taking the place of the PoE and converting to fibre), a rack mounted server and a CHR which I’m currently about finished configuring.

Over the next few days I will be installing the 260GSP switch/converter and re configuring the CRS125 switch in the cave and then it should be about time to “cut over”  and get my CHR live.

This is all a test though and there is a possibility it’ll all move back if I can’t put up with the noise from the server in the cave.

6-config-moved

MikroTik Router OS 6.41

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MikroTik have released their version 6.41 of the current build. Whilst there are some new features the most obvious one now is the removal of the master-slave relationship ability to allow hardware switching. MikroTik have done this in a bid to simplify the configuration meaning that now you can use the bridge functionality.

Previously bridging was all done through the CPU so switching on lower end hardware meant that you may not always get full speeds and often ended up with a 100% CPU utilization for a simple file transfer.

MikroTik have now made it so that you can add single, multiple or all ports into a bridge with a check box available to take advantage of the “hardware offload” function. Again, whilst not technically a new feature for the series, it is a redesigned way of achieving hardware switching. The result is a brilliantly clean implementation which resulted in the following from my testing on an older gigabit router.

hwoffloadtest