After watching the STH youtube video on the Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+IN it occurred to me that I had a possible use for such a device at work. The use case would be for a microwave link (two pairs of dishes) which use TP-Link media converters to convert from OS2 fibre to Ethernet then into two PoE injects (one for each dish) to power and connect the two Ubiquiti Air Fibre AF24HD dishes.
In less than two years since I started I have replaced both media converters power bricks so they don't appear to be supper reliable. In addition when one link goes down due to a media converter power brick because the media converters are "dumb" I have to manually figure out which one is dead and replace it (the PoE injectors keep powering the dish so it appears online in the console but traffic is obviously not making it back).
Each dish has it's own fibre pair but if the media converter dies there is no fail over on the fibre, the other dish just picks up (the core switch on each site runs OSPF over the microwave links to handle traffic redundancy) and keeps going.
I was thinking that putting a small switch in to replace the two media converters (and ideally the PoE injectors) would be the best thing to do as the switch would hopefully be more reliable and give proper data on when there is a fault and I could put some VLAN's on it to give some failover if one of the fibre links goes down. The small size of the CRS305-1G-4S+IN makes it ideal for this along with the small number of ports (I would need two fibre LC ports and two Ethernet ports) and the three power sources that could be used (the two DC in plus the PoE in on the "management" port).
The current gear is enclosed in a "weather proof" enclosure (it does appear to keep the weather out but the barking geckos appear to make it their home as well) so what ever is going into it would need to be some what tolerant to heat (I am unsure how hot the enclose would get) and wildlife. I saw the Mikrotik CRS105-5S-FB FibreBox which also looked good but appears to have only one power source so I am not sure if I would be trading one point of failure for another.
Would people recommend the CRS305-1G-4S+IN for this type of situation or would you leave the setup as is?
In less than two years since I started I have replaced both media converters power bricks so they don't appear to be supper reliable. In addition when one link goes down due to a media converter power brick because the media converters are "dumb" I have to manually figure out which one is dead and replace it (the PoE injectors keep powering the dish so it appears online in the console but traffic is obviously not making it back).
Each dish has it's own fibre pair but if the media converter dies there is no fail over on the fibre, the other dish just picks up (the core switch on each site runs OSPF over the microwave links to handle traffic redundancy) and keeps going.
I was thinking that putting a small switch in to replace the two media converters (and ideally the PoE injectors) would be the best thing to do as the switch would hopefully be more reliable and give proper data on when there is a fault and I could put some VLAN's on it to give some failover if one of the fibre links goes down. The small size of the CRS305-1G-4S+IN makes it ideal for this along with the small number of ports (I would need two fibre LC ports and two Ethernet ports) and the three power sources that could be used (the two DC in plus the PoE in on the "management" port).
The current gear is enclosed in a "weather proof" enclosure (it does appear to keep the weather out but the barking geckos appear to make it their home as well) so what ever is going into it would need to be some what tolerant to heat (I am unsure how hot the enclose would get) and wildlife. I saw the Mikrotik CRS105-5S-FB FibreBox which also looked good but appears to have only one power source so I am not sure if I would be trading one point of failure for another.
Would people recommend the CRS305-1G-4S+IN for this type of situation or would you leave the setup as is?