Written – Page 11

Home Router Update

02/02/2018 by Steveocee

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

01/02/2018 by Steveocee

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.

Exciting news for CHR in RouterOS 6.42RC

25/01/2018 by Steveocee

CHR has been the best way to deploy a virtual version of MikroTik’s RouterOS for a long time now. The dedicated virtual version includes some additional drivers and whatnot to make sure that it plays nicely with the popular virtualisation programs out there, Xen and VMWare being the 2 big ones everybody tends to go for.

Whilst some instances of CHR can now be found even on Amazon AWS there was still this niggle for those running Xen and VMWare that bugged them, traditionally on a “normal” VM you install it and then run the relevant “additional tools” installation so that the host cna pull out some information from the guest and also certainly in VMWare’s case, soft shut down or reboot the machine rather than a hard power off (we all know how RouterOS likes to log that as a fault!)

With 6.42RC things have changed though! Both xen-tools and open-vm-tools can now be found within the package and to ensure this wasn’t a joke I quickly span up a machine from the supplied OVA file and there it was feeding it’s name back to me as well as being able to soft reboot it. Good times!

A word of caution though, I personally would never recommend anyone use an RC for anything other than testing. New features introduce new bugs that need to be ironed out, whilst the wait for 6.41 to go to bugfix had started, now the wait is on for 6.42 to go to current!

you can download the latest version and see all the change logs openly on the Mikrotik website just here.

New Page Added

19/01/2018 by Steveocee

I think I’ve finally found a plugin that works how I want it to! I’ve now put a new page on which in short is an image log of my entire mancave build. You can find the page here or by clicking the link for “Project Mancave” in the menu bar.

MikroTik Router OS 6.41

19/01/201817/01/2018 by Steveocee

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.