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.

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gorkish a day ago | parent | next [-]

CRS are L3 switches; they are supposed to route and run dynamic routing protocols and do ECMP and all the good stuff so long as you dont configure features like nat and firewall that require the cpu and cant be offloaded.

The one thing that it frustratingly does not support that I wish it did is stateless bgp with ipv4 prefixes. It cant offload an ipv4 packet with an ipv6 next hop.

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walrus01 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I really would question any "professional" network engineer that can't tell the difference between a switch and a router...

https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in

Each of the mikrotik switches even comes with a block diagram linked on its product page, showing for instance a single 1.3 Gbps between its L2 switch chip and its CPU.

https://cdn.mikrotik.com/web-assets/product_files/CRS305-1G-...

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protocolture a day ago | parent | next [-]

>I really would question any "professional" network engineer that can't tell the difference between a switch and a router...

Oh the stories I could tell you.

I once had to work with a guy who didnt believe in dynamic routing.

Which wouldn't have been too bad but he also didnt believe in route summarisation or any kind of planning. So the network was carved up into random unpredictable blocks.

He sadly did very much believe in Mikrotik scripting, and so had scripts setup to disable/enable static routes based on very broad (often external) reachability criteria.

Whenever googles DNS had an issue the whole network would start flapping scripts like nobodies business.

The network was a large wisp with more than 600 pops and more than 10000 customers on its various services.

That engineer had been gainfully employed by multiple ISPs over 20 years.

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walrus01 a day ago | parent [-]

I've had supposedly credible professional network engineers send me their PRIVATE ssh keys for access to something more than once. As a response to "please send me your ssh key for access to $THING"

	▲	protocolture a day ago \| parent [-]
		Amazing.

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Hikikomori a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean thats a swouter.

	▲	walrus01 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's not, really, it's a basic commodity CPU with some RAM for the purposes of running the OS and management plane, glued to a layer 2 switch chip by a very narrow bandwidth path. A mikrotik switch such as this isn't intended to be used for any of the real layer 3 features of mikrotik routeros like routing, nat, ospf, bgp, mikrotik's own weird EoIP tunnels, etc. The problem is that people might login to it for the first time and see all of the feature set of RouterOS v7 available to them to start configuring things from the ssh CLI or web GUI. It might look the same at first glance as something that is actually a small router like the RB760IGS. It would probably be better if mikrotik included some kind of red text warning "this is not really a router" if people start entering layer 3 stuff into it (other than its own management IP, SNMP, NTP servers, etc). Same concept for the other very cheap mikrotik switches that are like 4 or 8 ports of 1000BaseT.
	▲	protocolture 8 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Scroll down to the ethernet test results. In lab optimal conditions it can route 1.2G It has 4 10G SFP+ ports. If you enable Queues AND Firewall Filters you will be down below 500M of throughput. Potentially less. If you ask this thing to do anything complex its going to shit itself. Now have a look at the block diagram. Note that the internal link between the 800MHz processor and the switch chip shows 1.3G. It would be an embarrassing cock up to deploy this as a router for a client. Even if you only need 1.3G of routing, there are better products.