For my new home network I'm thinking about using only managed switches with OpenWrt. Probably three switches used mostly for VLAN with a flint 2 as main router.
Based on the openwrt switches page I think the ZyXEL GS1900-8 fits my bill at 60 euro.
Is this a good idea, like future proof solution?
A cheap tp-link managed switch uses very little (standby) power; how does this Zyxel with OpenWrt compare?
I guess a more compact (ZyXEL) design is not possible?
I also looked at 2.5Gbit managed switches but they are more expensive, more power hungry and almost no OpenWrt support.
Thank you for reading. Other suggestions/ideas welcome.
Power-wise it should be very competitive. I've got a fully loaded GS1900-10HP (albeit with only one ESP32 powered via PoE, the rest are just standard 100mb or gigabit devices for media consumption) sitting around at 8 W.
In my measurements of GS1900-8 at the 12V DC input it consumes about 2.5W idle with no connected ports. Each EEE-disabled 1Gb/s port adds about 0.4W and EEE-enabled 0.1W.
If cost is a factor, I'd shop around for a used GS1900-8(HP). I've got mine from a local platform (not eBay) for as low as 30 EUR used. The non-PoE version should be even cheaper, but having PoE does not really hurt regarding idle usage if you have no PoE devices, so you can get whatever is available.
The PoE variant has a higher idle power consumption than the non-PoE variant, more regulator losses involved (48V), the PSU not operating in the optimum working window if there are no PoE clients using all that potential power. I'm not saying it's bad - and if you have PoE devices it may even be beneficial over n-1 wallwarts, but the plain gs1900-8 does need less (idle) power than the gs1900-8hp.
Technically, yes, of course. But in practice, 0.5 W or so won't make much of an impact. I doubt it's much more than this because my -10HP with 8 plugged in cables (incl. one SFP to copper transceiver, so one regular RJ45 port and one SFP port unused) has a long-term average of 6.5 W (without powering any PoE devices) and about 8.3 W with one ESPhome BLE proxy.
What are the benefits of running OpenWrt on the switch then?
There are still a number of valid reasons to run OpenWrt on the switch:
You benefit from all OpenWrt security updates on a regular basis
You gain a unified configuration experience on all your devices powered by OpenWrt / LuCI
You remove and eliminate anymost vendor-supplied binary firmware (the boot loader is usually not replaced and some firmware for the PHY is required)
You liberate your device from any cloud management features
You have excellent documentation and support in the OpenWrt Wiki and Forum
Use tcpdump and other tools directly on the switch for troubleshooting instead of dealing with mirror ports
Are there drawbacks?
Yes, there are a few drawbacks: There are some features that do not work or do not work properly (like link aggregation). Depending on the switch, some other features might be missing, check the commit message for your device and/or the wiki page for your device for details.
Some switches have limitations like:
No support or limited support for the LED configuration (due to no driver support being available; e.g. TP-Link TL-SG2452P)
Non-working SFP ports (due to no PHY driver being available; e.g. TP-Link TL-SG2452P)
Not all SFP ports supported (due to limitations in the i2c driver; e.g. HPE JG927A)
No support for PoE (due to no driver for the PoE controllers; e.g. ZyXEL GS1900-24EP)
No support for cable diagnostics (open/short/length)
…while on other switches all of these features are supported.
I still haven't bought any switches yet...
My mind got a bit lost on a cheap low power router with 5 ports (like Cudy WR1300), turn off wifi and put openwrt on it as a switch - but I probably cant use the WAN port as a vlan trunk... right?
I'm not sure about the Cudy WR1300 specifically, but based on past routers I've worked with, you usually can configure ports however you want (especially with modern OpenWrt DSA drivers). However, there's a catch: internal switch chips have a fast, dedicated backplane. If a port routes through the CPU instead of the hardware switch chip, you lose that backplane speed and become bottlenecked by CPU performance. For example, the Meraki MX65 has ports split across two switch chips, and traffic between those two pools has to go through the CPU.
Meraki worked for me as a switch for a short time. The problem was that it assigned an IPv6 address to the PC when my ISP does support IPv6 and I was sure that it was disabled. My Android device had no problems, but my Windows PC was stuck on a DNS error. So I replaced with "normal" switch.
I ordered the GS108Tv3 out of curiosity to see how OpenWRT works on it.
However, this is not a case of OpenWRT saving an aftermarket device from recycling or upgrading a home router to enterprise level.
The HP 1920-8G (JG920A) is very similar (same SoC as ZyXEL GS1900-8), but also has two SFP ports and a console port. Fatter chassis, but around here they sell for about £25 (~ €30). They were sold under both the HP and HPE brands, so worth searching for both.
I have the 24 port version, and it uses about 8W I think (let me know if you're interested and I'll get a meter out). The 24 port versions often go for about the same price as the 8 port (but probably use a bit more idle power).
I also had the 16-port version (JG923A), and that one interestingly used slightly more power (like half a Watt) despite having less ports. It was a few months older than the JG924A (manufactured 2016-05 compared to 2016-12), and still had the old HP branding. Same SoC revision, though.
Thank you for the replies. You guys have a lot of ports on one location... 16 ...24...
At the moment I don't need so many ports and if I do - I can always extend one managed VLAN port with a small unmanaged switch - those can be very low power and cheap.
My current plan (see ASCII below) is to have a managed switch (with OpenWrt) in each room for only managing two VLANs (one for trusted stuff and one for not-trusted stuff like digital tv).
This will require four managed switches... and this is why I'm so focused on a small low power switch that is also preferable not too expensive.
But none of them 8-port like in your initial question. Which widens the scope of suitable OpenWrt-supported devices considerably, to "almost all of them".
Keep in mind that by using OpenWrt, you are not bound by form factor or manufacturer-intended purpose. Virtually every OpenWrt-supported device can be a "managed switch". That specifically includes extremely low-powered devices that are not suitable for routing anymore, or "wireless routers" you may want to distribute as access points around the house anyway.
(Fundamentally, "OpenWrt-supported switches" do not differ in any meaningful way from other OpenWrt-supported devices, other than in the number of ports. In fact, those switches are otherwise extremely weak devices and would make for very poor routers.)
Why do you need or want openwrt on a switch especially low port models and you only care about tagging? So long as you stick with the same brand, the terrible OEM interfaces are tolerable for basic tagging.
Main switch: MS308E/MS305E 2.5G uplink to flint2 so you have 2.5G future proof
+
whatever you need/have in each room e.g. dumbap like another flint 2 with vlan tagging or cheap GS308E or MS305E.
