Ubiquiti Enterprise XG24
- Thread starter gerby
- Start date
Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.
It's probably something from Marvell or that tier of vendor, if I had to guess. I don't see any Marvell Prestera ASICs with 24+ 10G ports plus a few 25G ports, though. They sell chips that can so 24+ 25G ports, and chips that can do 24+ 10G ports but no 25G ports. They *might* be playing games with 40G->25G converters, but I doubt that's really cost-effective.
In general though, ~no switches support alternate OSes. The exceptions are (a) switches that SONiC supports (but I would *strongly* recommend against going down that road in general), (b) a handful of whitebox switches designed for ONIE and friends (but they generally need explicit support per switch), and (c) switch ASICs w/ switchdev support in the Linux kernel (mostly just Mellanox spectrum).
Switches in lists (b) and (c) are largely also covered in list (a).
The only really *interesting* "I ran a different OS on my switch and it was usable" story that I've seen is from Pim van Pelt, where he used Debian on a Mellanox SN2700 and was able to get ~full functionality, although without a particularly useful UI.
In any case, that's a *long* way from Ubiquiti's usual market.
It's usually possible to use Unifi gear by sshing into it and running `cli`, which will give you an undocumented Cisco-ish UI, but I wouldn't trust it not to lose configs or actually work correctly, as that's not really how they intend their switches to be used.
In general though, ~no switches support alternate OSes. The exceptions are (a) switches that SONiC supports (but I would *strongly* recommend against going down that road in general), (b) a handful of whitebox switches designed for ONIE and friends (but they generally need explicit support per switch), and (c) switch ASICs w/ switchdev support in the Linux kernel (mostly just Mellanox spectrum).
Switches in lists (b) and (c) are largely also covered in list (a).
The only really *interesting* "I ran a different OS on my switch and it was usable" story that I've seen is from Pim van Pelt, where he used Debian on a Mellanox SN2700 and was able to get ~full functionality, although without a particularly useful UI.
In any case, that's a *long* way from Ubiquiti's usual market.
It's usually possible to use Unifi gear by sshing into it and running `cli`, which will give you an undocumented Cisco-ish UI, but I wouldn't trust it not to lose configs or actually work correctly, as that's not really how they intend their switches to be used.
There's a user-maintained UniFi product chipset list here. Sadly, it lacks an entry for that particular switch; but eyeballing the list suggests strongly that UI prefer Broadcom or RealTek for their bigger switches.
If you have the switch in hand you might try ssh'ing into it and seeing if you can learn anything from nosing around. I would not try modifying any configs that way: it's unsupported, and the ssh login banner tells you in no uncertain terms that you will void your warranty. But reading stuff is fine.
If you have the switch in hand you might try ssh'ing into it and seeing if you can learn anything from nosing around. I would not try modifying any configs that way: it's unsupported, and the ssh login banner tells you in no uncertain terms that you will void your warranty. But reading stuff is fine.
Do not try flashing another OS on the XG24 — it’s unsupported, risky, and not cost-effective. If you need a switch that runs another OS, buy one designed for that purpose (like Mellanox or whitebox switches).
Yeah, that's the understanding I had. I've used the Unifi switching infra in the past and frankly I don't like the management stack Unifi provides in this space so I was hoping for some other option. This hardware had an interesting port distribution and I had an opportunity to pick one up cheap; I figured if _anyone_ had a better management or software option it would be the folks here.
I had not seen that before.
It doesn't change my comparison however. If you want something else, buy something else. Buying an Apple computer to then turn around and run linux on it seems like a completely waste of time and money IMHO.
I agree so far as new purchases go. However, there are plenty of old Apple machines around that are no longer supported by current macOS releases. They are still pretty decent hardware too. If you've got one, your choices are to recycle it, continue to run an old OS with known security holes, or run some other OS. So the fact that Linux distros are making an effort to run on Apple hardware is a great thing IMO.