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
Hi,
We use various Mikrotiks both on towers and roof tops for a WISP environment. The outdoor Powerbox Pro (RB960PGS-PB) is our current choice. The specs say -40°C to 70°C and it can be powered via POE. It can also supply POE to Mikrotik and Ubiquiti radios. They aren't super fast but we routinely see 500 Mbps on speed tests.
If you don't require an outdoor enclosure, there is an indoor version called Hex Poe (RB960PGS) but I haven't used that model. For non-POE situations, the hEX S router (RB760iGS) is very fast and rated for the same temperature range
Roy, AA4RE
On 7/27/2019 6:56 AM, Jason McCormick via 44Net wrote:
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
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
Back when we had a repeater network a few years ago we settled on Ubiquiti Edgerouters for our core as well as at all the sites as the gold standard. If your already using Juniper gear, the underlying os on Ubiquiti is a fork of Vyatta and is very similar in syntax and operation like JunOS.
It’s not perfect gear, but it’s cheap and reliable enough for what your after. Our biggest headaches were site related issues such as power surges and storms, we never had any reliability issues beyond that. I personally had an SRX100 at my site, had to reboot it more than I would have liked to, didn’t have as many problems with the Ubiquiti gear.
Good luck, sounds like a fun project.
73 Stephen K1LNX
On Sat, Jul 27, 2019 at 14:50 Roy via 44Net 44net@mailman.ampr.org wrote:
Hi,
We use various Mikrotiks both on towers and roof tops for a WISP environment. The outdoor Powerbox Pro (RB960PGS-PB) is our current choice. The specs say -40°C to 70°C and it can be powered via POE. It can also supply POE to Mikrotik and Ubiquiti radios. They aren't super fast but we routinely see 500 Mbps on speed tests.
If you don't require an outdoor enclosure, there is an indoor version called Hex Poe (RB960PGS) but I haven't used that model. For non-POE situations, the hEX S router (RB760iGS) is very fast and rated for the same temperature range
Roy, AA4RE
On 7/27/2019 6:56 AM, Jason McCormick via 44Net wrote:
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
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
+1 for the Mikrotik.
I've used a RB450G + RB7xx. The 450G works great, I have a few hundreds fw rules and 1k+ BGP routes. They both worked very well at 650Mbps with NAT until a lightning strike.
On 7/28/2019 1:48 AM, Roy via 44Net wrote:
Hi,
We use various Mikrotiks both on towers and roof tops for a WISP environment. The outdoor Powerbox Pro (RB960PGS-PB) is our current choice. The specs say -40°C to 70°C and it can be powered via POE. It can also supply POE to Mikrotik and Ubiquiti radios. They aren't super fast but we routinely see 500 Mbps on speed tests.
If you don't require an outdoor enclosure, there is an indoor version called Hex Poe (RB960PGS) but I haven't used that model. For non-POE situations, the hEX S router (RB760iGS) is very fast and rated for the same temperature range
Roy, AA4RE
On 7/27/2019 6:56 AM, Jason McCormick via 44Net wrote:
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
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
44Net mailing list 44Net@mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net
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Jason McCormick -
Quan Zhou -
Roy -
Stephen - K1LNX