Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jailbreaking RouterS

Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by dgl on Thursday December 08, 2022 @05:01AM (#33906225)

I've also replaced a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter with a spare PC I had around. It was a small form factor thing, I don't need WiFi, so I replaced the WiFi card with a M.2 Ethernet card[1], which gives me two network interfaces. The point is pretty much anything is powerful enough to be a router now.

(Actually my setup is more complex, as the machine is powerful enough to run a few VMs, so I pass through one of the PCI devices to a firewall VM, which means the VM host doesn't even see the outside world.)

One thing to watch out for is Intel released some bad 2.5Gbe hardware (e.g. earlier versions of the I225-V). I even have a more recent one that seems to have issues (even when running the latest Linux from kernel.org). You can find Realtek cards though, which seem to work better (yeah, who'd have thought that would be the case).

[1]: It was something like: https://www.amazon.com/Suroene-Ethernet-Adapter-Multi-Gigabi... -- there are others.

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Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by squarefoot on Thursday December 08, 2022 @11:47AM (#33910033)

There also are dual 2.5G Ethernet (and multiple SATA) adapters for M.2 sockets, which make things even more interesting for those little ARM boards.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804337466480.html

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256804400925663.html

OpnSense/XigmaNAS devs, are you listening?

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Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by sliken on Thursday December 08, 2022 @05:13AM (#33906286)

Apparently I225 went through 2-3 revisions, and the "b3" is supposedly ok. But the newer $200 PCs are now coming with the I226, which it's claimed is much better.

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Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by ThePowerOfFuet on Thursday December 08, 2022 @07:42AM (#33907235)

Re that M.2 Ethernet card, that's a long untwisted ribbon cable. 100Mbit should be fine, but 1G or 2.5G? Sus.

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Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by lmz on Thursday December 08, 2022 @10:24AM (#33908795)

I take it you've seen PCIe riser cables like this one:

https://www.amazon.com/Zer-one-7-5Inch-Extension-Flexible/dp...

If that sort of thing can work at PCIe rates I don't see any reason why that M.2 card can't. It's a lower bit rate plus theoretically a more resilient encoding for long distance as opposed to PCIe.

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Re:Pulling MikroTik into the Limelight Demystifying and Jail... by theideaofcoffee on Thursday December 08, 2022 @01:56PM (#33911619)

The untwisted ribbon cable is fine for PCIe in short runs by virtue of PCIe data lines being a differential signal and if the length of cable is kept short(-ish). The max length of the cable should vary inversely with the generation, that is, max length of a flexible copper extender for gen v1 is longer than gen v3, more length introduces more noise which increases error rates. A well terminated cable should be able to use the full bandwidth of the bus. I'd be completely comfortable running x16 flat out at max rate with one of those.

I don't have any hard-and-fast sources to back the above up, but punching 'pcie extender max length' into the Gargler should find you something to suffice.

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