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Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

No offense intended, I may have misunderstood something here.

You use a routerboard block diagram as your model to demonstrate how a hardware switch is connected to the rest of the system. But then you go on to claim that they are impossible/difficult to work with.

Did you source a routerboard at any point here? Fairly sure that OpenWRT can be built for most routerboards, and the 2011 should be a fairly common device on the second hand market.

Maybe this is a better question. Was the goal always to build from scratch? Or did you discard the concept of using someone elses hardware for a particular reason?

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I have a stack of them here, they are great to work with for their intended purpose but they are not that great if you want to run custom software.

I also grabbed a RB2011 diagram because it's a simple diagram that explains it well I think, the RB1100AHx4 is a better example technically since it's using the same switch chip but it's more confusing because they use the two CPU ports together and claim it's a 2.5Gbps link while it's two 1.25Gbps link and they ignore the encoding overhead.

The reason why I build this from scratch is that it that the expense is reasonable and this should end up in the FOSDEM video recording boxes and it has to fix a few issues specific to that design like it needing to expose 4 network ports to the front panel of the case but also be connected to the internal SBC. There's simply not that much space in the case to put passthroughs in the case to a switch to not have an external loop cable for the SBC and with a dumb switch the system can't be monitored anymore. Since quite a few of these boxes are built this becomes a reasonable solution (if you ignore design time, but this is volunteer work)

Awesome that makes sense.

The RouterBoard RB2011 is stuck on an ancient release version of OpenWrt, 19.07, see here: https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb2011

The problem seems to be somewhat related to the NAND, which is IIRC somehow different from the supported RouterBoards. Somebody proposed a new solution to this problem, but that hasn't landed yet: https://forum.openwrt.org/t/wiki-cleanup-for-mikrotik-rb2011... and other threads.

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