What's your favorite brand for network gear?
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Big fan of cheap stuff that works good. HP seems to fit that bill for us. There are probably cheaper / better deals for the money in the USA.
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@Dashrender said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
@scottalanmiller said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
@Dashrender said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
Huawei could solve this by making their platform completely open. Basically only sell hardware and allow others to make their own firmware/software that runs on it.
Who would buy it then? Useless hardware without vertical support? What business would use that? That's the DD-WRT model. Great for hobbyists, but that's not what they are going for. They want business usage.
Well the hope would be that the FOSS environment would make awesome firmware for it, than you could KNOW didn't have a back doors.
I understand the goal, but I fail to see the point. Who would buy that? We have stuff like that now, no one will buy it.
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I don't have a favourite brand as I haven't used enough to have a well rounded opinion but I sure do appreciate:
- No Java in the GUI
- neat and tidy interface
- Good warranty (EnterraSys Lifetime warranty
) - Reliable
- Not cloud based (On ya bike, Meraki)
- High thermal resilience
- Well priced support (Hint: NOT Cisco)
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@nadnerB said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
I don't have a favourite brand as I haven't used enough to have a well rounded opinion but I sure do appreciate:
- No Java in the GUI
- neat and tidy interface
- Good warranty (EnterraSys Lifetime warranty )
- Reliable
- Not cloud based (On ya bike, Meraki)
- High thermal resilience
- Well priced support (Hint: NOT Cisco)
No Java - good point. Got an old ProCurve still serving as an access switch which is running Java applets. PITA. Same for Adobe Flash in VMware vSphere (that's going to be replaced with a HTML5 frontend AFAIK).
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@Jason said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
@Dashrender said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
@scottalanmiller said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
@Dashrender said in What's your favorite brand for network gear?:
Huawei could solve this by making their platform completely open. Basically only sell hardware and allow others to make their own firmware/software that runs on it.
Who would buy it then? Useless hardware without vertical support? What business would use that? That's the DD-WRT model. Great for hobbyists, but that's not what they are going for. They want business usage.
Well the hope would be that the FOSS environment would make awesome firmware for it, than you could KNOW didn't have a back doors.
Hardware itself can have backdoors
Heard the story where the NSA intercepted shipments of switches and routers from well-known brands just to open the package, install a custom firmware and repackage it and finally sent it to the customer?
We're living in an odd world, even Orwell wouldn't believe that I guess. Hardware can have backdoors, same for software. But even the NSA or the big red dragon need to use IP I guess, so we can at least place a firewall in front of everything.
As for FOSS, well, I had a look at this:. There are quite some Linux based OS's for switches out there, like Cumulus or OpenSwitch (http://mangolassi.it/topic/9388/openswitch-moves-under-linux-foundation-umbrella). This on some open switch (bare metal or SDN) like the ones from Quanta (http://www.qct.io/-c77c75c159) or SuperMicro (https://www.supermicro.nl/products/accessories/Networking/SSE-G3648B.cfm for example) would at least increase the situations about software backdoors, but won't solve the hardware backdoor problem. But having software and hardware separated, both can be more easily tested for backdoors. And THIS could in fact improve the situation.
Sadly, we are just not there yet: Bare metal and Linux/BSD in core networking is coming, but it will take many years to reach the average SMB. Right now, the whole open switch story is all about SDN in the datacenter, as far as I know.
