OT : Are routers good as Network Switches

So, consumer grade routers, such as the ones supplied by many ISPs, do not handle large amounts of packets well.
They can 'lock up' as the internal hardware gets overwhelmed dealing with this sort of thing. Plus many of them have subpar cooling for any kind of 'actual' workload.

Unmanaged switches, like the trusty 5 port netgears many of us use and love have nothing that helps to mitigate this.

So yes, a better router(I personally love my TPLink ones as I can schedule them to restart periodically) might very well help. Or some better cooling ala heatsinks, or a box fan. Or just power cycle the thing every couple days *shrug*

I had been having a ton of issues. I switched my ISP router into bridged mode, I switched my wireless router into AP mode, and then bought an Edgerouter X. Once I turned on QoS, it solved the last of my problems, or at least the ones that were in-house infrastructure issues.

https://www.ui.com/edgemax/edgerouter-x/

I still have an old iPad that will drop wifi in the middle of my son watching videos, even while it has good signal, and refuses to reconnect until i reboot, but I'm assuming that it is a client issue.

I actually built a script to monitor pings to a number of devices on the home network, as well as doing speed testing, and then a web interface I can monitor that from, view historical trends, etc. Since I got that running, I haven't had an issue yet.

If you need stability and good control over your netwowrk you could use the ISP router as modem and then have a MikroTik router or EdgeRouter doing all the routing and switching work.

James Mcquade said:

unmanaged switches poll every comm port for information.
managed switches as I under stand things, asks if you need data or have data making them more efficient. if I am wrong, someone please correct me.


james

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You are mostly correct.
Unmanaged switches poll all ports.
Managed switches can be configured to direct certain communications between individual ports, including turning off ports. You can also monitor speed of communications and some other values.

Cascaded switches can cause problems. The three parallel switches should be no issue but any switches under a switch has this issue as I understand it:
Every port on a switch records the MAC address of the device on that port. So when you ask for a device that has been previously recorded, there are no "WHERE IS" message broadcasts; the switch goes right to that device. If that device on the port is another switch, every time a message comes upstream from a device on that cascaded switch, it has to record another MAC address and another and another all by broadcasting to all the network WHERE IS such-and-such over and over.

My office/shop setup:
ISP Modem/Router. ISP programmed it to bypass the router function.
First step in: NetGate SG-5100 Firewall - pfSense software factory version
6 usable ports but I only use one to go to:
Planet GSW 2404SF 24 Port managed switch.
Wireless access: ASUS AQC1200 dual band - no hardware plugged it.


Get yourself Wireshark and watch what's happening. Look for unnecessary broadcasting and even unknown devices.

BachPhi said:

Sound fishy enough. Isn't Huawei the one company that Trump banning their product for putting spyware.

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The fact that you own a device from Huawei is a spectacular worry some to me.

Huawei's problem is overblown. I be more worried about all the Alexa and webcam devices. There are no zero risk with anything but we should know enough to put things in perspective.

NetNathan said:

You are mostly correct.
Unmanaged switches poll all ports.
Managed switches can be configured to direct certain communications between individual ports, including turning off ports. You can also monitor speed of communications and some other values.

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What I found is that "managed switch" means very different things to different vendors. When most IT says "managed switch" it means a Cisco switch with IOS that can do port-protection, STP, ether-channel, etc.. etc..

In the industrial realm, take the popular NTron switch for example, it doesn't do half of the stuff that a standard Cisco can do, nor do most industrial user ever need all the functionality either. Cisco is also very very slow in booting up so I hate putting it in industrial environment (Rockwell's Stratix is basically re-branded Cisco)..

Maybe it is, but the fact that Chinese army own these front entities speak a lot.

BachPhi said:

Maybe it is, but the fact that Chinese army own these front entities speak a lot.

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eh, what?

TikTok was created in China. The militaries of other countries (can't remember which) banned any service personnel from installing it, because it was harvesting data. Source: Seplicity

the_msp said:

TikTok was created in China. The militaries of other countries (can't remember which) banned any service personnel from installing it, because it was harvesting data. Source: Seplicity

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So it's ok for US companies to harvest data from users (Facebook, Microsoft, CIA) but it's not ok for Chinese?

kallileo said:

So it's ok for US companies to harvest data from users (Facebook, Microsoft, CIA) but it's not ok for Chinese?

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<alert type="sarcasm" level="severe>


no, it's only okay if the intent is to make money.


</alert>

You can say the same for Xbox 1, on their disclaimer, it said privacy not protected; but people still ordered anyways.

kallileo said:

So it's ok for US companies to harvest data from users (Facebook, Microsoft, CIA) but it's not ok for Chinese?

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Your argument is so ridiculous, sounded just like a commie trying to tell us covid-19 was released by US.

When a user sign up for free FB, MSN service, somewhere in the fine print, he/she already accepted that some personal data will be collected.
I don't understand why you even mentioned CIA, it's a government agency and yet there is law that govern in case they decided to track someone.

On the other hand, when a consumer purchase a router from HUAWEI, he/she did not expect that router is spying on ALL activities and sent it the Chinese government. And we all know from the past and present experience, many intellectual properties are stolen by the Chinese.

Enough said!