On home network setup and router software choices...

[sfx2000]

People can avoid that level of details with a managed switch and its GUI.

Yep... and that provides a layer of safety as well, so keeping the router config clean and simple, and one can do experimentation inside the switch - many include a config backup, so if a config change doesn't work, it's simple to roll it back without having to start over...

 

[kvic]

Yep... and that provides a layer of safety as well, so keeping the router config clean and simple, and one can do experimentation inside the switch - many include a config backup, so if a config change doesn't work, it's simple to roll it back without having to start over...

A large managed switch is economical but have to lay more cables around the house. A few smaller ones are more ideal but the sum adds up fast. Fancy stuff that costs money. For @homenet, I would think better to buy a few ER-X...lol. Use one as router. The rest configured as smart switches. Or if you like, tiered routers for some locations in the house. This thing is such a useful building block when I think more about it..

 

[kvic]

FreeBSD (OPNSense, pfSense) is often said to have the most respected network stack, but it evolves more slowly, which may or may not be preferred.

No doubt about its heritage as the stack carries DNA right from UNIX. I wonder performance wise it's still true today..

 

[sfx2000]

No doubt about its heritage as the stack carries DNA right from UNIX. I wonder performance wise it's still true today..

It performs as well as any other - one strength about the BSD Networking Stack is that it's a great reference to study and learn, because the code there is clean and simple, and very well documented - and you'll find pieces and parts of it in many other platforms because of the BSD license... if one is in a CS program at school, this is likely the first thing one will see, due to it's stability over time, and how well it's documented (and the functionality, which is obviously quite good, it's stood the test of time)

Solaris has an awesome network stack - and has for quite some time... in many ways it's actually closer to ancient Unix thru it's SysV roots (Berkley rewrote a lot of the networking code to expunge ATT copyrighted code as part of the BSD settlement). But Sun put a lot of more recent tech into that stack (example - Streams, which at the time, was revolutionary), and Oracle has been a good steward and kept it up to date - I share a lot of common concerns with the CDDL as others might after Oracle pulled back on OpenSolaris (same concerns as many feel about ZFS)...

OSX/iOS/XNU - it's a good stack as well - lot of basis goes back in NextStep, and it shares a lot of BSD heritage, but it's evolved enough on it's own to be called something separate from BSD.

Windows - the most recent stuff out of Redmond is very, very good - Server 2012 and Win10 are worlds better than what we had in Win2K/Vista era, and better than XP's.

Linux - again, quite good - the challenge with Linux is that it's evolving very fast, and this is both good and perhaps challenging for developers - there are certain API's there are fairly stable, and the extensibility of the stack allows folks to bring in new functionality with minimal impact - the big challenge with Linux is that there are many heads in that particular tent, and kernel changes as well, and this can break things - esp. with proprietary code that tries to shim into it.

 

[kvic]

Nice prose, sfx..

By looking at common routers, interesting to see what run underneath some of them:

JunOS/Juniper routers - FreeBSD based
VRP/Huawei routers - Linux based
RouterOS/Mikrotik - Linux based
EdgeOS/Ubiquiti - Linux based
IOS/cisco carrier grade/some enterprise routers - QNX based
IOS/cisco other routers - ancient proprietary in-house OS (I don't want one frankly..)

Mikrotik didn't pick *BSD and it started around the same time as Juniper in mid 90's. Back then, FreeBSD's network stack easily outperformed Linux.