HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router

I've been a MikroTik fan since the beginning of my career some 15 years ago now. I have used the MikroTik router and Ubiquiti AP combination ever since. With that said, I can absolutely agree that their UX is terrible for anyone who doesn't specifically know how to configure a MikroTik router. The fact that you have to configure FQ-CoDel yourself and some bufferbloat protection isn't just a built-in option is absurd for anyone using it as a home router.

For me, the era of MikroTik is sort of... now.

Don't get me wrong, they make powerful and feature-complete stuff, but their UI sort of assumes you really know what you're doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

But my LLM does. I've been able to set up site-to-site VPNs with Mikrotik in fifteen minutes now, rather than the day-long exercise of googling and praying.

I'm more than happy with VyOS. Throw that in proxmox and you have an open source JunOS with zero license headache.

I do use Mikrotik for 2.5g switching though, zero complaints.

I love Mikrotik products but they are lacking what I need at home. I need basic IPS/IDS, notification when something is wrong without writing mikrotik scripts, easy backup failover, etc not VxLAN, QinQ and BGP extensive filtering :) I moved to Unifi Cloud Gateways as home/small soho routers and can't be happier. But Mikrotik stays as emergency hardware backup ..

About 2 years ago I tried to use Mikrotik, as the router for my ATT Fiber.

It's royal pain.

Basic router setup is not hard.

Port forward to expose web server? Can be done after heavy docs&forum reading, but hair pinning never worked for me.

I checked their WiFi AP. It's UI is hard even for senior software engineer.

In the end I got opnSense installed in VM on Proxmox and it's my router for last 2 years.

I'm using 2 Mikrotik switches with their simplified UI to operate VLANs. Zero complains.

Just use linux! Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could truly own your router?

It's a great educational experience I would recommend to anyone interested in networking. Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.

So good to see so many articles pop up on hn regarding self-hosting and home labbing

I am using a tiny mini pc j6412 with fd.io vpp(with dpdk enabled) and some customized plugins for pppoe and overlay tunnel, it works quite well

and it's cheap and fully customized, and powerful

For me when building homelab, customizability maybe important

Switched to Ubiquiti, I'm quite happy except for their lack of a sane MCP.

I’ve been very happy with Mikrotik.

Chose them partly to reduce dependence on US tech too.

I am glad, I am 99% sure it's the case, that I don't have to do CGNAT with ATT. Sounds like a pain.

I like ipv6 but I have been thinking of disabling it lately because i cannot technically setup static leases with ipv6 like i can with ipv4, so technically the ipv6 for one of the services in my homelab could change and cause problems.

From some time, I had a though about getting my home-lab. Prior to that, I've decided to prepare my networking for it and ditch the router given by my ISP for MikroTik to optimise the network. It turned out it's not easy - why? Check it out on my latest blog post!

Mikrotik is not a mere replacement for plug and play routers such as TP-Link and the like. It's a very advanced device offering countless networking features, including multiple VPN server options, advanced Layer 2/bridging/switching features - VLANs, nested VLANs (Q-in-Q), VXLAN, spanning tree protocols (STP, RSTP, MSTP), 802.1x authentication, bridge-based firewall and bridge-based NAT, data center bridging (a.k.a. "lossless Ethernet"). Advanced Layer 3 features such as BGP, policy routing, traffic shaping, VRRP, hardware layer 3 acceleration. Then containers, matter/thread protocols, mesh networking, advanced wi-fi features such as centrally-managed network (CAPSMAN), multiple/virtual access points, hotspots, and many many more. Advanced firewall for both IPv4 and IPv6. On top of that scripting, SSH server, NTP server, DNS cache. API client for advanced integrations, and built-in scheduler, packet sniffer for troubleshooting, safe mode for automatic rollbacks of recent changes in case when the admin gets cut off due to a dangerous change. It'd be really hard to enumerate all that RouterOS offers.

And all that is available from tiny home/SMB office devices starting at 40 USD, through dedicated wireless point to point bridges, to a big Ethernet switches/routers with 400G interfaces.

Of course it doesn't compete with high end NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Cisco or Juniper, but is good enough for 95% of networks.

It works great as a plug&play home/office router, too thanks to Quick Set, but for more sophisticated setups, a knowledge of networking protocols is mandatory. The more fancy setup, the more in-depth knowledge is required. Just like with programming and all stuff in life.

I can't read the nearly-white (or super-thin font) text on the white background.

Is that representative of using mikrotik hardware?

I just got a backup ISP at home and connected fiber directly to Mikoritk using SFP dongle instead of the box provided by ISP.

Scripts on RouterOS handle network checks for failover, DNS updates, etc.

I got that Mikrotik home router 10 years ago and it is still performing great and handles most of the use cases without issues.

Mikrotik is really a sweet spot for routers. It's feature-rich and it has a nice Web UI (or WinBox that is now cross-platform). And Mikrotik as a company is just amazing; they still support hardware that is almost 15 years old.

Other routers:

1. OpenWRT is a bit too basic, and updates are hit-and-miss.

2. Ubiquity is a bit too Apple-like, with its reliance on apps and integration.

3. Cisco is WAY too expensive, and too complicated to set up without having Cisco experience.

I'm now eagerly waiting for them to release the next generation of their routers. hEX Pro looks perfect to replace my aging CCR2004.

Frustratingly I couldn’t find a Mikrotik that would offer me a few SFPs, and a 2.5 or two. I wanted ideally just 3 SFPs - two WAN for LB / Failover and one up to switch. 2.5g WAN would do but would rather SFP for future use.

UDM-SE it is for now.

step 1 buy openwrt hardware accelerated NAT compatible device

step 2 throw the mikrotik in the garbage

I hope there is a part 2, where they make sure the internet can't access their management interfaces...

In Poland, Play.pl sets up IPv6 by default. One phone call to ISP to disable the hidden firewall on their router gives us full IPv6 network transparency, no NATs are needed anymore. I highly recommend after installing a firewall appliance (for example OPNsense, but probably Mikrotik should have it as well). IPv6 "feels" like how networks should work since the beginning. IPv4 feels like a legacy technology.

They of course also have a DS-Lite AFTR gateways to tunnel the IPv4 traffic. In practice, everything works (for me at least).

I love MikroTik, but ffs just let me install something else on it. SONiC or any other Linux would be awesome. I love their hardware, but their software is absolutely awful.

Is there any manufacturer out there who produces high quality hardware that is not locked down?

I went with omada and I'm happy for now

MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything.

For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it.

I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had been running like a dream.

I'm more than happy with VyOS. Throw that in proxmox and you have an open source JunOS with zero license headache.

I do use Mikrotik for 2.5g switching though, zero complaints.

I’ve been very happy with Mikrotik.

Chose them partly to reduce dependence on US tech too.

And all that is available from tiny home/SMB office devices starting at 40 USD, through dedicated wireless point to point bridges, to a big Ethernet switches/routers with 400G interfaces.

Of course it doesn't compete with high end NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Cisco or Juniper, but is good enough for 95% of networks.

I just got a backup ISP at home and connected fiber directly to Mikoritk using SFP dongle instead of the box provided by ISP.

Scripts on RouterOS handle network checks for failover, DNS updates, etc.

I got that Mikrotik home router 10 years ago and it is still performing great and handles most of the use cases without issues.

I hope there is a part 2, where they make sure the internet can't access their management interfaces...

They have an increasingly capable "simple" UI for casual users. It seems like improving it is on their roadmap, as they've been delivering vast improvements in functionality with each major release.

Also, shipping winbox on all platforms has been a huge QoL improvement

For me, the era of MikroTik is sort of... now.

Don't get me wrong, they make powerful and feature-complete stuff, but their UI sort of assumes you really know what you're doing. I don't know what I'm doing.

But my LLM does. I've been able to set up site-to-site VPNs with Mikrotik in fifteen minutes now, rather than the day-long exercise of googling and praying.

LLMs certainly help out - in my case, agent helped with searching through various web forums about how my ISP authenticates and sets up Internet connection.

Nevertheless let's give MikroTik, where it's due:

* new documentation page is much cleaner to browse

* tutorials on their YouTube channel are quite informative

* WinBox v4 has in my opinion much more pleasent UX/UI than v3

I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.

Mikrotik makes great hardware that shines under Openvrt )

It’s been great for llm + cli usage on mikrotik

About 2 years ago I tried to use Mikrotik, as the router for my ATT Fiber.

It's royal pain.

Basic router setup is not hard.

Port forward to expose web server? Can be done after heavy docs&forum reading, but hair pinning never worked for me.

I checked their WiFi AP. It's UI is hard even for senior software engineer.

In the end I got opnSense installed in VM on Proxmox and it's my router for last 2 years.

I'm using 2 Mikrotik switches with their simplified UI to operate VLANs. Zero complains.

It wasn’t terribly complicated for me but I seem to be built for the old Cisco style iOS.

But with an LLM it’s easier than falling off a log and the command line means it can do everything easily.

It should be doable by most software engineers. They did teach some basic CCNA course in the university as part of computer science studies and the concepts taught there should help a lot with configuring any router, including RouterOS. It could also be helpful to watch some guides on routing and firewall on Linux, since RouterOS is just Linux with a very specific UI on top.

Agreed. I tried Microtik. Seemed like it was written by DOS people from the 70s or 80s, made difficult on purpose.

I ended up switching to back to Ubiquti.

Switched to Ubiquiti, I'm quite happy except for their lack of a sane MCP.

What's the state of FOSS licensing compliance? Have they repented?

Ubiquiti unifi has struggled to integrate routing as reliably and as well as the wireless and switching piece. Mikrotik router and unifi everything else has kind of been my go-to for at least 10 or 12y now.

I can't read the nearly-white (or super-thin font) text on the white background.

Is that representative of using mikrotik hardware?

Other routers:

1. OpenWRT is a bit too basic, and updates are hit-and-miss.

2. Ubiquity is a bit too Apple-like, with its reliance on apps and integration.

3. Cisco is WAY too expensive, and too complicated to set up without having Cisco experience.

I'm now eagerly waiting for them to release the next generation of their routers. hEX Pro looks perfect to replace my aging CCR2004.

UDM-SE it is for now.

I love MikroTik, but ffs just let me install something else on it. SONiC or any other Linux would be awesome. I love their hardware, but their software is absolutely awful.

Is there any manufacturer out there who produces high quality hardware that is not locked down?

I went with omada and I'm happy for now

Apologies, fix should be live now

and reader-mode doesn't show the text

In which way is OpenWRT basic?

on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home.

I installed openwrt and then installed it on many mikrotik routers over the years. to be honest, not so much traditional routers (wifi+4-5 ports) but on ~10 port mikrotik switches for my infra.

i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)

What exactly did you need and how did https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in not do it? It says switch but it runs routerOS and can route at some speed - not 10G tho.

You can easily install openwrt on most of MikroTik routers. Rb5009 is also supported now if you need more powerful router.

https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb5009ug_s_in

Sometimes having generic Linux capabilities on network equipment makes it hard to understand the configuration. On RouterOS you can just /export the configuration and read a single file. On Linux/SONiC there are multiple ways to do the same thing - you can do one part of configuration using ifupdown, then make some changes in systemd-networkd, a bunch of shell-script DHCP client hooks, rc.local, cron @reboot. Imagine being handed over a router that someone has fixed by doing some runtime reconfiguration (like `ip ro replace default via 192.168.0.1 advmss 1410`) that would vanish with almost no trace (except maybe .bash_histotry) when you reboot it - that won't be possible (without doing very special scheduler/script trickery) on RouterOS.

But if you still want it, MikroTik doesn't try too hard to prevent you from running modified software. You can port OpenWrt, and most modern MikroTik devices use modern enough Linux to use a device tree blob. Try pulling out a dtb from your firmware and ask an LLM to do the initial porting - just don't forget to backup your RouterOS license key first, they are device specific.

The opnSense Deciso boxes are very nice and open - if a bit on the expensive side.

https://shop.opnsense.com/product-categorie/hardware-applian...

Mikrotik makes great hardware that shines under Openvrt )

They have an increasingly capable "simple" UI for casual users. It seems like improving it is on their roadmap, as they've been delivering vast improvements in functionality with each major release.

Also, shipping winbox on all platforms has been a huge QoL improvement

It’s been great for llm + cli usage on mikrotik

What's the state of FOSS licensing compliance? Have they repented?

and reader-mode doesn't show the text

LLMs certainly help out - in my case, agent helped with searching through various web forums about how my ISP authenticates and sets up Internet connection.

Nevertheless let's give MikroTik, where it's due:

* new documentation page is much cleaner to browse

* tutorials on their YouTube channel are quite informative

* WinBox v4 has in my opinion much more pleasent UX/UI than v3

I’m going to admit it took me too many years to realize there is a Mac Winbox client - I assumed it was a windows only thing.

Agreed. I tried Microtik. Seemed like it was written by DOS people from the 70s or 80s, made difficult on purpose.

I ended up switching to back to Ubiquti.

They run linux and offer ssh but with a custom shell that mirrors the "web shell" in usefulness.

Ubiquiti sucks nowadays but Microtik is simply insane.

It wasn’t terribly complicated for me but I seem to be built for the old Cisco style iOS.

But with an LLM it’s easier than falling off a log and the command line means it can do everything easily.

The router probably should work without relying on LLM:

I remember I misconfigured it, and can't really Google around or ask LLM to fix it, because my Internet is down now.

Of course I can use Internet on my phone, but it's not really convenient setup to ask LLM to troubleshoot the router.

I can't speak for the more "entreprise-y" unifi stuff but the routing on the ubiquiti gear i've used is actually just FRR and if you SSH in you can do a whole lot more than is surfaced through the UI - for example, I have VXLAN running on my UDR7 right now.

It's not something I've tried but I imagine you could actually expose FRR directly and configure through that

What exactly did you need and how did https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in not do it? It says switch but it runs routerOS and can route at some speed - not 10G tho.

Apologies, fix should be live now

In which way is OpenWRT basic?

on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home.

I installed openwrt and then installed it on many mikrotik routers over the years. to be honest, not so much traditional routers (wifi+4-5 ports) but on ~10 port mikrotik switches for my infra.

i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)

The opnSense Deciso boxes are very nice and open - if a bit on the expensive side.

https://shop.opnsense.com/product-categorie/hardware-applian...

crs305 will choke when you start asking it to do NAT. it's a switch. It should be able to hardware-route between VLANs but it's not made for "home router" duties.

CRS is the switch product line and you would not believe how many professional network engineers do exactly as you have suggested and installed a CRS and asked why it locks up when routing.

Wow, wasn't really expecting a response, but got a quick response along with a fix. Thank you, excellent support!

Nice detailed write-up too, and great explanatory diagrams.

I was thinking the same thing. I switched from Mikrotik to OWRT because I wanted actual Linux, not a nerfed version of it that made scripting miserable.

> on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home

Yes, I think it connects to the mikrotik cloud automatically to setup a usable external DNS to your device, but I believe access to it is turned off by default unless you turn it on.

https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/network-management/cloud/

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/197984280/Ba...

The other reason is for updates, it can check periodically for firmware updates.

But outside of that it's not like streaming network telemetry or anything like that.

> i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)

I’m sorry what? You can run openwrt on that line of switches?

I just have a 24-port one at home running stock firmware…

> if a bit on the expensive side.

chokes on coffee

From my old-man, everything-is-stupidly-expensive point of view, this is my scale:

cheap side | reasonable | expensive side | Deciso boxes

They run linux and offer ssh but with a custom shell that mirrors the "web shell" in usefulness.

Ubiquiti sucks nowadays but Microtik is simply insane.

crs305 will choke when you start asking it to do NAT. it's a switch. It should be able to hardware-route between VLANs but it's not made for "home router" duties.

Wow, wasn't really expecting a response, but got a quick response along with a fix. Thank you, excellent support!

Nice detailed write-up too, and great explanatory diagrams.

> on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home

Yes, I think it connects to the mikrotik cloud automatically to setup a usable external DNS to your device, but I believe access to it is turned off by default unless you turn it on.

https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/network-management/cloud/

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/197984280/Ba...

The other reason is for updates, it can check periodically for firmware updates.

But outside of that it's not like streaming network telemetry or anything like that.

The router probably should work without relying on LLM:

I remember I misconfigured it, and can't really Google around or ask LLM to fix it, because my Internet is down now.

Of course I can use Internet on my phone, but it's not really convenient setup to ask LLM to troubleshoot the router.

There is a safe mode built in. If you enable it and you loose connection to the router due to some misconfiguration, it will reset within 15 minutes to the point of where you started the safe mode session. Also if you mess up the IP layer, there is a chance that you can still connect and configure RouterOS through their WinBox program using the mac address.

Yeah, it's inconvenient when the [effectively] black-box router device that only the bot understands goes out to lunch, and takes access to the bot along with it.

But the degree of inconvenience is up to the beholder.

One way is using something like ChatGPT with a pocket supercomputer. It's tedious to get technical stuff done that way, but it can be accomplished. (For those who haven't tried it, the bot can be spooky-good at correctly interpreting cell phone photos of technical text on a screen. This saves a ton of transcription effort.)

Another way is with the phone's hotspot and just about any random computer. Laptops have wifi. Wifi dongles for desktops can be stupid-cheap, and it's useful to have a few scattered around. It works fine (unless one's hotspot data is ridiculously-limited, I guess).

The best way is probably by being prepared with procedural fall-back methods. Keep backups of your configs, and keep the recovery instructions with them. Test recovery; an untested backup isn't necessarily better than having no backup at all. Keep as many historical versions as one wishes, and automate it because procrastination is part of the human condition.

After that: When the router's config gets stuffed up, then the backups and the restore instructions are right there. Just pick an appropriate backup and use it.

We should probably be keeping backups of important stuff like that even in the absence of LLMs. Humans also err, and stuff does break, and what seemed obvious six months ago when we were in the groove might be impossible to remember when we need it today.

Their products aren't really for consumers, maybe prosumers, but mainly smaller companies or ISPs that don't want to pay for Cisco.

I’m going to admit it took me too many years to realize there is a Mac Winbox client - I assumed it was a windows only thing.

It was, until they came up with v4 around a year ago or so.

It's possible to run v3 under Wine on a Mac but it was kind of clunky. V4 is much nicer (also runs on Linux too).

> if a bit on the expensive side.

chokes on coffee

From my old-man, everything-is-stupidly-expensive point of view, this is my scale:

cheap side | reasonable | expensive side | Deciso boxes

> i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)

I’m sorry what? You can run openwrt on that line of switches?

I just have a 24-port one at home running stock firmware…

I'm not disagreeing but they are quite powerful and fanless, with generous networking ports and both RAM and SSD can be upgraded.

I haven't been able to find many other devices that tick so many boxes. These seem to exist on a class of their own.

It was, until they came up with v4 around a year ago or so.

It's possible to run v3 under Wine on a Mac but it was kind of clunky. V4 is much nicer (also runs on Linux too).

Their products aren't really for consumers, maybe prosumers, but mainly smaller companies or ISPs that don't want to pay for Cisco.

So good to see so many articles pop up on hn regarding self-hosting and home labbing

step 1 buy openwrt hardware accelerated NAT compatible device

step 2 throw the mikrotik in the garbage

Just use linux! Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could truly own your router?

It's a great educational experience I would recommend to anyone interested in networking. Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.

> Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.

The problem with this (assuming you meant a generic (x86?) system) is that you won't get wire speed processing (no hardware offloading), so network performance will suffer. Unless you buy a dedicated router board (which is typically ARM), like say something like the Banana Pi BPI-R4. But installing/configuring a standard distro line Debian for such a board would be a PITA (if you want to do it right and set it up optimally), so you're better off using a dedicated router distro like OpenWRT.

Please link a SFF box or SoC with:

- 1x10GB SFP+

- 1x2.5GB Ethernet w/ PoE In

- 7x1GB Ethernet w/ PoE In/Out

- powered by DC jack, 2 pin, or PoE

- Similarly sized to 220 × 125 × 22 mm (approx 8.66 × 4.92 × 0.86 inches)

- Max power consumption 150W

- Silent

- ~$300

And I can replace my RB5009Upr+S+IN.

Bingo. I use Mikrotik for my switches. They were the first I found that had 10Gb uplinks, inexpensively and with low power usage. L2 configuration is janky (like every other switch) but workable. I use both SwOS and ROS, but moving towards ROS for dot1x (unfortunately inescapable to have that functionality on the switch).

But the actual router? That lives on NixOS in a virtual machine on a generic amd64 machine that also runs NixOS. I'd rather design / perfect my config once in terms of iproute2/nftables and know I can swap in any hardware. I've got a full policy routing setup that let's me define for each device what Internet horizon it can see (along with what other local devices it can access).

I also find the sibling comment mentioning routing speed to be funny. I've found that unencrypted gigabit WAN is easily handled by most amd64 computers. 10Gb LAN->LAN hairpin routing seems fine. But the big thing is doing gigabit OpenVPN/wireguard, which off the shelf hardware-accelerated routers just don't really do unless you spend a lot. (coupled with the above policy routing, I can configure things like this particular web browsing VM goes out a data center IP that rotates every day).

Wireless APs are similarly handled by hostapd on NixOS, driving (mostly) Mikrotik MiniPCIe Wifi cards. I don't really need the latest and greatest wifi gen, rather I just need them to work and be as maintenance-free as possible.

>Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could

All my life I have had to make do with junk I could get at Walmart or Best Buy. Got tired of it. Cheap plastic shit that would inevitably shit the bed just a month or two after the warranty expired. I'm not making the IT helpdesk wages I was making 30 years ago... fuck that. While I couldn't spend ten grand on home networking, I could finally spend a little something on hardware that's not total shit.

Got the CCR2004-16G-2S+. No stupid ONTs, either, just the SFP+ modules. Plenty of backup 1gig ports if I get a third WAN (thinking about getting Starlink on standby). Actual proper fucking APs that do seamless handoff (hell, one of them probably covers the footprint of my house, if I'm honest). And no more shitty GUI configuration pages. I just shell in and band out commands on the command line (at least three times til I get the syntax right, but who gives a fuck).

Wish they made something with 3 or 4 SFP+ ports that I didn't need a rack for.

I am glad, I am 99% sure it's the case, that I don't have to do CGNAT with ATT. Sounds like a pain.

Android (phones, tv boxes) doesn't respect DHCPv6 IA_NA, but it should respect DHCPv6 IA_PD. Unless you have some other system that doesn't respect DHCP? Linuxes, Windowses, Playstation 5's support DHCPv6 IA_NA without problems.

But also, even if a device doens't support DHCPv6 IA_NA, you can always also have a DNS server in your network, and you can bind SLAAC-generated Android addresses to simple subdomains. This seems better than DHCP anyway.

I am using a tiny mini pc j6412 with fd.io vpp(with dpdk enabled) and some customized plugins for pppoe and overlay tunnel, it works quite well

and it's cheap and fully customized, and powerful

For me when building homelab, customizability maybe important

I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.

>Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could

Wish they made something with 3 or 4 SFP+ ports that I didn't need a rack for.

MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything.

For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it.

I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had been running like a dream.

> cannot wait for the contract to expire

There is no contract with MikroTik. You buy the hardware, that's it. The software and updates are free.

Another option is to just buy some used enterprise mini PC (google project tinyminimicro) with PCIE slot, and use that. Probably lower power consumption than a full rack mounted server, definitely takes much less space (unless you already have the rack).

Please link a SFF box or SoC with:

- 1x10GB SFP+

- 1x2.5GB Ethernet w/ PoE In

- 7x1GB Ethernet w/ PoE In/Out

- powered by DC jack, 2 pin, or PoE

- Similarly sized to 220 × 125 × 22 mm (approx 8.66 × 4.92 × 0.86 inches)

- Max power consumption 150W

- Silent

- ~$300

And I can replace my RB5009Upr+S+IN.

Looks like OpenWrt supports that model, so going that route would be an option of not having locked down software.

> Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.

I’ve not tried with 10gbps or faster links, but since we’re talking home use my success with 2.5 gbps links on standard amd64 hardware would suggest you’re wrong.

Modern CPUs are quite capable. The problem isn’t performance, but power use.

That's bogus unless you're talking above 10G, in which case the only things typically doing wire level performance are expensive and sold by vendors like Cisco, Juniper or Arista (and maybe it's higher than 10G now). Frankly, the vast majority of ARM based routers, unless you go out of your way, are garbage. Any x86 built in the last 15+ years with a NIC that's also not trash _will_ push at least 1G routed with a non-trivial firewall on a modern Linux kernel no problem. I've still got half a dozen PC Engines APU2 boards that unequivocally will get right at 1G on Debian Trixie; newer ewaste like Dell Wyse thin clients or Optiplexes would absolutely smoke those boards on performance.

Setting up a router with Debian is really kind of overstated in terms of difficulty, and frankly half of everything wraps Debian anyways (looking at you Ubiquiti/Vyatta), so why learn someone else's half cooked configuration language when you can just do the real thing.

Any remotely recent generic office PC should be able to handle line rate 10 Gbit routing as long as it has the PCIe lanes for it.

I route my home 10G internet on a ThinkCentre Tiny with a 2018 Core i3-8100T.

Is this a problem with home networks? I have pfsense installed on some mini PC I bought off Amazon.

Setting up Debian as a router might take some effort but it's certainly not difficult. Enabling routing is a single line config change, install dhcpd and you're almost there. I'd certainly recommend the router OS.

from my brief search:

real-world OPNsense (yea, that's not Debian) benchmarks show that even low-power Xeon-D (Skylake-D SoC) with 10G SFP+ NICs:

pushed 9.40 Gbps in plain router mode

7 Gbps with packet filtering and no rules

7 Gbps in NAT mode

5.5 Gbps with a default ruleset

Also, power consumption.