homelab

I’m quite partial to to-link and ubiquti

I’ve got pfsense coming into the house, and then ubiquiti throughout.

Anything running open wrt. I have 4 different devices with ooenwrt on them and they justseamlessly works greatt .

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 used to be a big netgear fan. But they had a lot of connections with the nsa. So now I use tplink for everything since they're a great cheaper brand. But they're chinese, so I traded one invasive country for another

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.