Apologies mods if this is in the wrong place but it's not a "project log" as such but I wanted to share with the OCUK community what I'm currently doing with my home router(s).
Currently I am using a MikroTik RB3011UiAS-RM to terminate my home 100/50 connection. It has absolutely no problems at all and has always been rock solid but I fancy a change and I plan on doing some much more intensive packet monitoring in the future so felt the time was right to upgrade. Now I have a "proper" rack in my mancave (see link in sig) I felt the time was right to move over onto something with a bit more grunt (even though the RB3011 struggled to maintain 2% CPU usage).
First thing was to take a base R210ii and remove the existing kit, I've left in the Xeon 1220L as it's a dual core with HT and is very low power (ideal for a router). As this box will have slightly more than 1 purpose as it will replace both a router and one of my HP microservers it also needed some bumps to stock kit.
Why? The router that I'd ideally "want" is a 9 x 1Ghz core CCR1009 which is the best part of £450 which is absolutely far too much for a home router, also doing this enables me to remove another machine from my network and hopefully save a few watts.
16GB RAM moved in from the HP microserver first
Quad port NIC next to make sure I have enough ports, I will designate all of these as my LAN group in time.
There it is in place. The board only has 1 PCIe slot which is a shame as I'd liked to have put in a HP Dual SFP card as well
Storage next, Intel 330 will hold ESXi and the router VM, Kingston is for my virtual Windows 7, the HGST I have no idea as it was lying around and the WD blue will be a storage drive for the Windows 7 as it will run Deluge as a seedbox.
Ready for hard drives, I'm just waiting on getting some drive bay adapters from 3.5 to dual 2.25's so I can run all 4 drives in a solid mounting.
Boot media made and booting for the first time
Every ESXi install I do hangs here and there is an uneasy wait for it to get past this point
ESXi installed and set up, imported the pre-made OVA file from MikroTik's website
4 Cores, 4GB RAM and 16GB of SSD space is massively overkill for this but it installed and ran with no issues
We're in
Started tinkering with interfaces, I was going to hand each of the 4 ports of the NIC in separately but in the end have left them in the ESXi vswitch and am just handing RouterOS the "1" LAN interface
All hardware set up and in place, I've given it both the onboard interfaces as individual NIC's so I can have 2 WAN inputs (not that I need 2 as I only have 1 but hey, scale.)
Config was exported form my old RB3011, manipulated and then placed onto the new CHR. The "good stuff" is disabled currently so the old router is still doing it's thing until I can get to switch it all over.
Jobs to do:-
License CHR (this is free to do but I didn't get time last night)
Link up fibre to carry WAN to my cave
Move WAN over
Monitor sound levels as the R210 is a touch noisy
Currently I am using a MikroTik RB3011UiAS-RM to terminate my home 100/50 connection. It has absolutely no problems at all and has always been rock solid but I fancy a change and I plan on doing some much more intensive packet monitoring in the future so felt the time was right to upgrade. Now I have a "proper" rack in my mancave (see link in sig) I felt the time was right to move over onto something with a bit more grunt (even though the RB3011 struggled to maintain 2% CPU usage).
First thing was to take a base R210ii and remove the existing kit, I've left in the Xeon 1220L as it's a dual core with HT and is very low power (ideal for a router). As this box will have slightly more than 1 purpose as it will replace both a router and one of my HP microservers it also needed some bumps to stock kit.
Why? The router that I'd ideally "want" is a 9 x 1Ghz core CCR1009 which is the best part of £450 which is absolutely far too much for a home router, also doing this enables me to remove another machine from my network and hopefully save a few watts.
16GB RAM moved in from the HP microserver first
Quad port NIC next to make sure I have enough ports, I will designate all of these as my LAN group in time.
There it is in place. The board only has 1 PCIe slot which is a shame as I'd liked to have put in a HP Dual SFP card as well
Storage next, Intel 330 will hold ESXi and the router VM, Kingston is for my virtual Windows 7, the HGST I have no idea as it was lying around and the WD blue will be a storage drive for the Windows 7 as it will run Deluge as a seedbox.
Ready for hard drives, I'm just waiting on getting some drive bay adapters from 3.5 to dual 2.25's so I can run all 4 drives in a solid mounting.
Boot media made and booting for the first time
Every ESXi install I do hangs here and there is an uneasy wait for it to get past this point
ESXi installed and set up, imported the pre-made OVA file from MikroTik's website
4 Cores, 4GB RAM and 16GB of SSD space is massively overkill for this but it installed and ran with no issues
We're in
Started tinkering with interfaces, I was going to hand each of the 4 ports of the NIC in separately but in the end have left them in the ESXi vswitch and am just handing RouterOS the "1" LAN interface
All hardware set up and in place, I've given it both the onboard interfaces as individual NIC's so I can have 2 WAN inputs (not that I need 2 as I only have 1 but hey, scale.)
Config was exported form my old RB3011, manipulated and then placed onto the new CHR. The "good stuff" is disabled currently so the old router is still doing it's thing until I can get to switch it all over.
Jobs to do:-
License CHR (this is free to do but I didn't get time last night)
Link up fibre to carry WAN to my cave
Move WAN over
Monitor sound levels as the R210 is a touch noisy
When I get an R210 it will be going under the stairs for now so hopefully the noise is ok. I put up with my R710 in there for a few months and that howls like nothing else under load.
