Mikrotik CRS326-24G-2S+RM 24 Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch...

Most Helpful Review

"I have deployed my fair share of sites and gear, this was one of the stranger ones. This being said I also have security concerns due to some of the articles I have come across in my assessment of this device.RouterOS - This thing has a LOT of features - especially for the price-point. Off the top of my head with the exception of a few functions - I would place it in the same category as a Cisco ASA for feature set, but this has its caveats. Diagnostically it would say it has better tools, or at least ones that appeared more useful to me.SWOS - This thing is fit for home use pretty much exclusively - I do not trust it, and it is missing a lot of features for a managed switch. SWOS feels cheap and flimsy to me (YMMV). Many features that one would expect in a small to medium office switch are not present. Let just say, if you were to try and deploy a single one of these you should be fine, trying to deploy 5-50 of these to a site would take forever, and from what I saw - diagnostically it would be an exercise in self abuse.I will be focusing on RouterOSThe CLI - it isn't the worst I have ever seen (please note that I have seen thousands of different CLIs), it however is no where near the best. And the command set will take a bit (possibly a lot) of getting used to. It reminds me more of something you would see in windows for its context.The GUI - I actually liked this, it has everything easily accessible and not much of it seemed out of place (with the exception of the switching - fun fun, amirite? Protip - all of the switching is handled by the Bridge section, not the "switch" section as one would expect.). It was VERY responsive, and the addition of a safe mode was great (I WOULD VERY MUCH SUGGEST YOU USE THIS DURING CONFIGURATION).And on to my main issue here (And I will be skipping SWOS for this - because that is only slightly confusing to figure out the caveats of - and I was honestly somewhat scared of it due to its lack of features) - Configuration, and how foreign it was for me. If you come from Cisco IOS land you are in for a treat (if you like confusion and puzzles). This relates to trying to configure this as a switch with vlan trunking and such. Setting this up as a router actually seemed pretty easy, and if you are getting it for that task you probably won't be lost.Configuring this as a switch to take a simple tagged trunk (** UPDATE - here was mention that untagged vlan did not work on a tagged port - This is no longer the case**) and push access vlans or additional trunks to the ports- Here is where the show instantly stopped for me. I will not go into that in detail - as this would be even longer of a review, but to save you all a lot of time and trouble if you have a console cable -/interface bridge portremove numbers=0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25add bridge=bridge interface=ether2 pvid=100add bridge=bridge interface=ether3 pvid=200add bridge=bridge interface=ether4 pvid=200add bridge=bridge interface=ether5 pvid=200add bridge=bridge interface=ether6 pvid=300add bridge=bridge interface=ether7 pvid=300add bridge=bridge interface=ether8 pvid=300/interface bridge vlanadd bridge=bridge tagged=ether2,bridge vlan-ids=100add bridge=bridge tagged=ether2 untagged=ether3,ether4,ether5 vlan-ids=200add bridge=bridge tagged=ether2 untagged=ether6,ether7,ether8 vlan-ids=300/interface vlan add name=vlan100 vlan-id=100 disabled=no interface=bridge/ip address add interface=vlan100 address=10.0.0.254/24 disabled=no/ip route add dst-address=0.0.0.0/0 gateway=10.0.0.1 disabled=no/interface bridge set bridge vlan-filtering=yesThis will1. Take all of the ports out of the bridge2. Build your trunk for VLANs 100, 200, 300 on port 2, assign VLAN 200 to ports 3-5, and assign VLAN 300 to ports 6-8.3. Create VLAN 100 on the switch, set the VLAN 100 address to 10.0.0.254/24, and create a default route to 10.0.0.1Edit as needed to suit your needs. All of the ports that don't go in are unassigned and will pretty much do nothing.The CLI and GUI are pretty much in line with each other, so you should be able to use the above config to figure out what you need to do inside the GUI. Just don't remove the bridge or the port you are using as your uplink. Use safe mode until you get it right, and the reset button if you lock your self out (from the cli - "system reset-configuration").As a note - I used port 2 instead of 1 as my uplink to make sure I did not set this switch on fire with the UPoE out of my other switch (yes I was being lazy). You will need to make sure to tag both the trunk port and the bridge with your management VLAN to be able to reach the switch.One last noteIn RouterOS on this one you need to be careful with many of the feature sets, as they could take the data out of hardware offload and push it across the CPU. I do not have an exhaustive list of those, but you should just assume that if you firewall or route anything it will be doing at least some of that in software and"