 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about Mikrotik. Specifically, there's a 10 gig desktop switch here, which is pretty impressive. It's got four SFP parts. If you want to learn more about Lawrence Systems, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you want to hire us for a project, click on the Hire Us button, and we'll talk about whatever project you'd like some help with. Back to the Mikrotik. This device is pretty cool. I got to admit, so I've been asked to review these for quite a while, and I don't use much of the Mikrotik equipment. We've seen it out in the field, and it's there, it's working. Some people rant and rave about how much they like it, but it does come with a steep learning curve. But why are people so excited about it? It's very inexpensive. They kind of kill it in price, and especially with this. This is probably everyone who has a home lab. Probably this is in it if they need 10 gig. And I see that because if you're trying to get started learning networking, this has all kinds of features. There's a pretty broad amount of features that Mikrotik includes. Granted, it's going to take some time in a learning curve to learn them, but, you know, it's a good practice learn. And this thing was like $139 for something that has four SFP plus 10 gig ports. That's just, that's crazy. It seems like the prices are really coming down. It's hard to sometimes find used ones for that good of a price. I mean, I'm not seeing it out there, but for the most part, right here in January of 2020, this is still a great price on a 10 gig switch, especially for something brand new. That being said, I like the mounting options on it. We do have the little, we have feet on it if you just start setting it on a shelf, but we do have, it doesn't, that I seen, I didn't see a rack mount option. It wouldn't be rocket science to make one. But you could also take it and put a little screw in there, slide these in. And it's a metal design, metal design. And as you notice right away, the lack of a fan passively cooled, therefore not noisy. So let's turn the overhead on and take a closer look at the board. So here's a closer look at it. And the first thing to note is this. I thought this was just a little bit strange. We have the link lights on the side. So we got the reset button and the link lights for representing the SFP ports over here, SFP plus ports over here, and the one RG 45, one gig port power. And, you know, easy to get to reset button that you can get. No big deal there. Backside, we've got two DC 12 volts. You don't need to run two at a time. It has two of them for redundancy. So this is probably, you know, definitely commercial oriented because in maybe a small equipment rack where you need 10 gig switching to get maybe let's say a Wi-Fi device where you're doing some type of high end backhaul and you have a small rack, this would fit in that small rack, but still be able to have redundant power. Pretty impressive. So you can connect it to two different UPSs. A little bit closer look at the front ports on there and they're labeled. Of course, if we, when we put this back together, you'll see them labeled SFP and ETH and boot POE in SFP plus one, two, three, and four. So pretty clear labeling. Nothing, nothing spectacular there, but one thing I'm going to say is this, these are your standard electric electrolytic capacitors, the less expensive kind provided this doesn't get too hot. The life of these can generally be pretty good, except when they get really hot, they can dry out. So that is a design to think about the fact that they use these, that you don't want to put this in too hot of an environment. The switch itself does not run too hot, but if you were mounting this within a hot area, just think about that when in terms of longevity, but that being said, sacrifices are sometimes made to make things a little bit less expensive. My guess is that's why they are have only three solid state caps, but then they have one, two, three, four, five of the other ones on here. So, you know, not, not a huge deal, something really minor to just keep and be aware of that being said. And if you're not aware, sometimes the SFP modules can generate a lot of heat and with no fan being on this, you will change the overall ambient heat around there. Also like the cable management right here. So when you're running the power cord through there, it does, you take this off and you can crimp, not one, but two power cords through there. So the cable management can be nice and neat when you're mounting it. All right. I'm going to slide it back together and let's get into a little bit more details about this. So the box is booted up and you see the E light for ethernet and nothing in the SFPs right now. So one, two, three, and four are empty. And also notice I'm not plugged in right here. It does PoE. So that's a pretty cool. No problems there. One thing that's nice is they do include, so if you don't have PoE or you don't want, want to power up PoE, they do include the adapter right here. It was in the box. So good for them. They, I get an adapter, I get PoE so I can power this up a PoE out of the box. When you're setting these things up, plugging it into the ETH adapters, the best way to get going with it. Now I did test on my, on a Windows computer we have here, but my laptop does not run Winix, does not run Windows or Wine therefore, which I've been told Winbox, they're Windows based software for configuring these should work, but I just didn't feel like loading it on here. I'm just going to use the web interface. I'll assume a lot of other people are. There are some differences. I think you get a little bit more with their Winbox tool, but like I said, it's kind of a weird Windows tool to me a little bit strange because this is like days gone by where I use some weird Windows configuration too early to push settings to a router. But you know, that's something you do have an option for. It's not particularly easier to use. It actually just seems to have a few more features. Another way to configure this is from the command line. So a couple of different options on there by default out of the box, this has an IP address of 192.168.88.1. That being said, when you use the Winbox software, if it's on the same segment of the network, it will talk to it and you can get into it. Even if you're not setting up the IP, the Winbox can talk to things on the same land. That way, if you ever lock yourself out, it is kind of a cool software to use for that. Maybe later, if I really dig into it more, I'll use it and do a video on it. But as far as let's just talk about getting this thing configured. And now we'll talk about router OS and how that works. So here we're in the router OS and the default config was static. Like I said, 192.168.88.1. I just went into the same network. You log in with the username admin, no password, and you're in. I switched over address acquisition to automatic address source any. You can actually, this is where the configuration allows you to do things like specify which ports or even which VLAN you can pull access from, VPN, like I said, goes beyond the scope of everything that we're going to talk about today. Then you can set a password on there is by the way, it's admin without a password. So there's nothing to do there. The other thing you may notice is it's like, it's got a WLAN option. This is because the router OS, which there's some advantages perhaps of doing this has everything in it. So we go over here to this tab here. We have all these features, the bridge, the switch, PPP mesh settings, IP settings, wireless settings. You're thinking, what wireless? Well, this is where you have to look up the features of the device you're using. So router OS runs on all of their equipment, whether it's a switch, it's a router, it has wireless or not. So there's a lot more in here than this can actually do. I don't have the breakdown of exactly every feature, what's missing as opposed to what's exposed in here. It does have managed networking support. It does support VLANs, which if you're just going to use it for a switch, which was what we're talking about, that's important. So that does work perfectly fine for that. You do have some of these routing, lots of things under system. This is pretty cool where you can set packages, look at the health, the history, identify it, and the Winbox software, by the way, will, if you ever have to reformat it, so to speak, and reload the OS, there is ways to do that. I noticed, like I said, it's not something I dove into. They have a wiki on their website, like a standard style wiki where they have a lot of documentation, but it is a lot to read through. I want to cover some of the basics of getting things set up. Now, one of those basics is when you set things up like switch OS, switch OS is separate from router S. So configurations you make here and in the switch OS, so I'm under system, you go to switch OS, and you notice how, for example, it wants to allow from up to 32 ports, but this only has the five ports on it for SFP plus and one network, one RG 45, one gig port. You can configure all these and more things, once again, are exposed that may not exist. So these are checked and I went to set the static IP. I want the IP to be the same, but I also have the set to DHCP. So I have a reservation set in my network to say, Hey, go ahead and hand this over. Now, one thing I'm going to note that when you set VLANs and switch OS or router OS, they are separate from each other to two separate configuration files. That's why even though this is set in here, if we don't configure it for the switch OS, but you, you won't, it won't work. You have to configure each one. Like I said, there's no, that I can, that I'm aware of at least my rudimentary understanding of router S. I didn't see any way that that information shared between them, but when we switch over to switch OS, it gets a lot less confusing to do things. And it's my confusion, not people serve someone screaming at the keyboard time, you should know how this whole system works. I just haven't really taken the time in the air and I just needed it for some 10 gig testing. So we're actually go over here to router board and from router board, we go to settings and thank you everyone on the live stream. When I was unboxing this, who told me exactly how to get to this. So I didn't even have to search for it and we're going to set the boot OS to be switch OS. And now what this does now is we can hit okay or apply and when it reboots, it goes into switch OS. Now, once you're in switch OS, you can switch it back. There's the settings thing and you can switch back to booting router with switch OS does boot a little bit faster. Like I said, and you're going to see the big interface change when we switch it over to switch OS, which is a little bit like I said, easier to manage. So go ahead and reboot the box. And now when it reboots, it should be on there. So we'll give it a second to restart. All right. Now it reboots fast, especially when you have switch OS, the boot up times like maybe 15, 20 seconds. I didn't measure it exactly, but it's it's relatively quick from the time you start to the time it's there. And now we have a simpler interface. It's probably easier to do switches in. So we have a VLAN idea of 50 that I created. I just want to do something real quick. We set it up to be 50. It's kind of to do that. We're going to go here and hit append. Like it's not like insert new. So if I wanted another VLAN in here, one, three, three, seven. And when we hit apply all now, we've added another VLAN in here. So let me go over here to our VLANs and I have SFP four is set to 50 and we can set this one one, three, three, seven, for example, and apply all and they apply and we're going to force a VLAN ID on here, apply all. And now what happens is it came in because we're using this port first. This is what shrunked in. And now this one is going to output VLAN one, three, three, this one 50. And for example, if you're going to use this as a storage network, you could break these out to be a separate storage network. There's a lot of possibilities. I'm not going to get into everything about it because I'm not really good at it yet, but I want to at least cover the basics that I want. Cause I know a lot of people had asked this, but it's also interesting when you hit apply everything's pretty instant. There's not like a delay to do things. Now, even though this isn't the full router S and like I said, it's kind of a more basic one. It still has quite a few things in here. So you can go in, you can look at the different features of it. You can see whether or not there's a link currently, it says one gig link there. If there's an SFP link, port isolation options, lag, forwarding, RTSP, stats, et cetera. So there's still quite a bit of information in here. Now a few things I have tested with this one completely routes a 10 gig. No questionnaire, no problems. That works fine. Right now I've got this plugged in, which is one of the RJ 45 adapters. So it takes SFP plus to RJ 45 10 gig. So this gives you an RJ 45 10 gig. These are a little bit pricey at about $40. These are made by, um, actually, let me look QSFP tech. So these work perfectly fine. I haven't had a problem with these particular ones in here. They, uh, I've only been testing with a couple of days with them, but they seem work. I got them for a demo because they have an upcoming video on all these different adapters. I also tried them with the 10 G tech 10 gig, uh, with fiber. This worked perfectly fine. No problems connecting a 10 gig. I connect them to the ubiquity switch I have in the back. I've also tested with these 10 G tech DAC cable, 10 gig worked fine with this. No problems transmitting at 10 gig. Also, I happen to have some of these one gig unify fibers works fine with these as well. So I've popped these in and no problems at all, uh, working with it. Now something to note and I'm going to have an upcoming video on this topic, but these are both 10 gig. What's behind me though, this SFP poor here is only a one gig port. The negotiation, uh, and this happens in a lot of switches. You do have to, it's not like the RJ 45 will negotiate the speeds as well. Uh, it didn't negotiate when I tried to plug it in, but you can downgrade to one gig on here and set the one gig setting in here and away you go. And I bring that up because let's go back over to the, uh, switch OS here. It right now has that port three plugged in with this 10 G RJ 45 adapter. It's plugging to my laptop. My laptop is not 10 gig, but it seems to think it is. It does show the proper ones for the others, but for this 10 gig, uh, perhaps because the negotiation I assume is happening inside of the RJ 45 adapter, it reports back to this as 10 gig, but it does report properly for the other devices I plugged in, whether they were a one gig or a 10 gig device back to the VLANs that we set up VLAN 50 VLAN 1337, 50 1337 that are defined here. We also have them in here and now let's see what IP address my laptop got. So we are connected at one gig, not 10 gig. And there we go. So 10 dot 13 dot 37 dot 10. That is my 1337 VLAN network. I'll go ahead and move this over and pull this out and we're going to pop it in the other side real quick here. So we're moving it over to the other port, which is set to port 50 and move it over. It'll take a second. Now these negotiate a little bit slower when you're doing this. There's like a little bit of a delay just with these. It's not at all on this port. Again, it's just the way the port activates and then does the negotiation before it determines and sets the IP address, but it works perfectly fine. And we'll see we have this IP address 10 13 37 go IPA. Now I'm at 192 and six eight 50. So that works. Now I don't think and let's, uh, let's go ahead and cut these as they say. So we'll cut, cut, apply all. And I think if I swap these, if I don't define the VLANs because they're defined elsewhere in my network, I believe it will still just tag and pull the tag off the VLAN on these ports. Let's see if that's true. We're all learning together right now. Like, like I said, I'm not an expert on how Mikrotik works. So I've done those, but left the tagging on right here with force VLAN ID. So we'll wait for my computer to negotiate the connection. And as soon as it does, we'll see what address I get. Yep. The 337 address. So yes, even if you don't have them defined in here, uh, it still can pull the tags. I assumed it could, but like I said, that's, you know, here and over there. Now I will go out and show you though, if you are in this and you want to go back to the other system, you can just go here and boot router OS down at the bottom and you can go back to the router OS and have the more advanced features in there. But like I said, there's, there's not that I can tell when you change settings on one side or the other. I maybe certain settings carry over. I'm not clear on which ones. I didn't do a lot of reading on that part. I really wanted us to get the switch working in a basic mode for some reviews I have coming up and maybe I'll play with a little more. And it's kind of nice to have one, uh, for some 10 gig projects, because well, I can do them right here in the studio. And we did test. We ran, um, which is going to be this one over here is some of my future videos. We did test running the 10 gig RJ 45s that come off the unify to this and making sure they work at 10 gig and they do without any issue. We transferred the speeds and I didn't bother doing any part of this video of transfer speed because it works. Other people have done it. It, this one does it. That's the least exciting thing it does. It does do what it says and work at 10 gig. But do I think they're a great purchase? Yes. I can definitely see the validity of this particular product. Um, it's just a really great price on having 10 gig networking in your home. That's for sure. Uh, not too bad for basic configurations, but the cool thing is, if you got the time to put into it, you want to learn the operating system on here. And of course, people tell me the command line, you know, basically opens up all the features to it once you take the time to learn the command line and SSH into it. That is awesome. So it's something you can start with to get the basics running. But if you have some future, uh, playing, you want to do in learning, if you have time, such as, you know, college students and things like that, uh, awesome. You have a really, there, people are not wrong about it. It is a very powerful little device. Uh, it just has that little bit of a learning curve, but you got the basics. If you want to get set up, that's what I want to cover in this video. Uh, for, so if you wanted it just basically integrated into your rack, not bad. Not a bad little thing. I'll leave a link below where you can get this and with an affiliate link. And as always, appreciate it. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon. If you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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