On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 8:44 AM, Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:
Can confirm the current ER Lite is a plastic enclosure. But for $ 100 I can definitely look past that.
At that price point I'm not complaining. However I do have a preference. ;) And I do think that the metal cases are a better design - sturdier and likely better heat dissipation.
Also, most of the UBNT distributers seem to be very knowledgeable about the product line, so I'm sure they would know if you asked them :-)
Our rep had to do some digging... He managed to tell me that the ERLite now has a metal case. He did not tell me whether they have any with metal enclosures. But that's probably hard for them to say though.
We've been running XORP internally for about 100+ CPE devices (actually the ones we were looking at Vyatta as a replacement for). In the end I think that moving to Quagga was a good thing for Vyatta as XORP doesn't have a very active developer community. XORP releases since 1.6 have been a forked code base that eventually became XORP 1.8. It's very touchy, and requires quite a bit of operational experience to know what will cause it to crash and what won't. The big thing you get with XORP that you don't with Quagga is multicast routing, and a more active community. I've been really interested in BIRD [0] as well, but haven't had a chance to try it out.
BIRD is on my list too.
Back to UBNT, though. The ER makes use of a lot of non-free code (not so great), but it's to facilitate hardware acceleration (very nice). A lot of functionality for IPv4 and IPv6 are both implemented in hardware, including not just forwarding and NAT, but also regex matching for DPI. It's how they can get so much PPS for such a modest piece of hardware. I believe the chips they use are from Cavium [1], but I could be mistaken.
Thanks for the informative discussion, Ray! And others :) -- ---~~.~~--- Mike // SilverTip257 //