Preferred Vendors

Juniper for R/S, Palo for firewalls. At home I use pfsense and UniFi APs and in that environment they’re great.

I got a lot of exposure to MikroTik's route/switch devices when I worked at a WISP and really came to love them.

Wireless: Aruba, Cisco, Meraki

I know what you meant when you said "Wireless", but I'm going to go with Siklu for their Kilo EtherHaul 70/80GHz radios that can no shit do 10Gbps links up to like 10 miles in ideal conditions.

This seems to be a divisive opinion, but I like Mikrotik routers. I run an RB3011 at home, and at the TV station I work at we have a transport stream out of the station to one of the transmitter sites over a GRE tunnel on two RB4011s. They aren’t as easy to support as Cisco but I like them.

We have an Aruba which is only ok, and several HP Procurve switches that are very simple and easy to manage. No fancy interface that takes up screen space or resources.

For monitoring, I use CheckMK and I just got done installing NetDisco. CheckMK installation is easy but the configuration is daunting because I could monitor literally whatever I want as long as there’s data for it, and then alerting is another layer of complexity and decision-making added onto it.

I installed NetDisco because I wanted something that could show me a very basic “automated” network map. The TV station is 40 years old and has random things plugged in under floors and behind walls controlling lights and similar auxiliary devices, and it’s hard to tell exactly what is where or what that thing does. I’m pairing this with a Netbox installation that will serve as a source of truth for the hundreds of network cables, hundreds of audio cables, hundreds of GPI cables, and thousands of video cables and all of our racks of hardware so everything is listed in one spot and I can easily see what it’s associated with (example: interface 27 on switch 2 is associated with cable 2385. Cable 2385 is also associated with camera 6. Camera 6 has Audio 512 and GPI 73 plugged in). Netbox also has the ability to manage an asset inventory, which would add another useful tool.

I apologize for rambling. Finally getting solid documentation on the physical and logical topology of my station is exciting.

Fortinet

ONE DAY after we bought one it turns out [https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fortinet-fixes-critical-rce-flaw-in-fortigate-ssl-vpn-devices-patch-now/amp/](they were being pwned and Fortinet is being a weasel in their security communications)

I blame myself. I knew old ones were being pwned but this just feels bad. Life goes on but ugh

Wait, Cisco == Meraki ;)

I work for Aruba (outing myself on my first post on Lemmy, smooth move dude) but I see Mist marketing themselves everywhere in the space, interested on people's take on them.

Personally I love Fortis for firewalls and SDWAN, Huawei for routing, switching and WLAN. Clearpas for Auth. I do not have a lot of experience in different Monitoring softwares but am quite used to solarwinds.

Depends on the load, budget for capex and opex, and what the network will be running :)

I liked HP procurve before the Aruba firmware was introduced. For wireless, I used to like Ruckus 5 years ago. Cannot stand the move to cloud management that all the WAP vendors seem to require.

For auth, the click verify of duo is pretty nice if the security of a physical OTP device isn't needed.

For firewalls.... ASA if NSA isn't in the threat profile.

• Firewalls: Fortinet, Juniper
• Route/Switch: Juniper
• Wireless: God please no
• Auth: FreeRADIUS
• Monitoring: Zabbix
• Automation: Salt
• SDWAN: Fortinet

Juniper Routers and Switches are solid, firewalls are ok but pretty easily outclassed by a Forti or Palo these days

Juniper Mist for Wi-Fi is awesome, much better than other wireless solutions I’ve used personally

Id definitely include docker under automation. for monitoring we have started using managedEngine