Network Routers for Harsh Environments - 44net

27 Jul 2019

Hello all,

I am looking for some recommendations on network routers for harsh environments. By harsh,
I mean hot but not particularly dirty. I know there's a number of people on this list
who use Mikrotik and Ubiquit EdgeRouters for your deployments and I am looking for
thoughts on those product lines, as well as any other similar products. I am looking for a
reasonably low-cost device. The key items I am looking for are:

- Wide operating temperatures. Some of the sites are tower buildings that don't have
A/C and during last week's heatwave the in-room temperature in one of the buildings
was 105F-110F (killed an SRX power supply). None of the rooms will freeze in the winter
but the temp will get quite low.
- RELIABLE -- some of our sites have limited access and frequent power cycles, port
failures, etc. are show stoppers
- IPv6 support for basic routing and switching functions
- Support for BGP and OSPFv3 (routing tables < 100 items)
- VLAN tagging
- IPSec or OpenVPN tunnels as clients
- No firewalling or the ability to pass traffic without firewalls - note I don't mean
a "permit any/any", I mean literally the device operates as a router or traffic
can bypass a firewall-like function.
- The device is a pre-packaged commercial system; I don't want to have to mess around
with custom Linux/BSD installs, etc.
- A device that can operate as both a router and switch would be nice, but not required

As background, our club has a wide-area network around southwest Akron, Ohio-area
stretching out to Rittman, Ohio and southeast to Alliance, Ohio with legs planned in other
directions. This network supports a number of ham repeaters as well as other related
services for the repeaters plus some of the site operations for the tower locations. Most
of the gear is showing its age and we're going to start a wholesale replacement of
most of it later this summer/autumn. 

All of the sites are connected with narrow-beam WiFi using point-to-point dishes,
currently N but upgrading to AC AirMAX when we do the hardware refresh. Each site has a
router or switch or both (depending on size and needs). The gear is a mix of Juniper
SSG5s, Juniper SRXs, HP ProCurve switches, and some other random items. As part of the
work, we're going to do a complete renumbering of the networks (which have grown up
ad-hoc over the years), incorporate better use of 44Net space, and overlay IPv6 across the
whole network. The reason for not wanting firewalling between the sites is we've run
into problems with link reliability over UDP (losing a few packets) and also certain
network device behaviors that don't survive multiple hops through stateful firewalls
for a variety of reasons.

Any thoughts in this community? I've been looking at the Mikrotik hEX S and the
Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X as example devices. I don't have experience with Mikrotik gear
although I hear it mentioned here a lot. 

Thanks
Jason N8EI