beautiful

all you really need to crimp rj45 is a pair of scissors and a crimping tool

(sorry i'm too poor for a wire stripper)

made two more (I bought Cisco RJ45 cables that were too long and had the wrong pinout, so I just ended up turning each cable into two with correct pinouts and appropriate lengths)

i probably should've done that with my RJ45-DB9 cable as well, now that I think about it

it's kinda therapeutic tho

here are some pics of the Hasivo S600WP-5GT-2S+. it's a L3 managed switch with 4 2.5GbE PoE ports, 1 2.5GbE non-PoE port, and 2 (10G) SFP+ ports.

it's a lot pricier than the S600WP-4GT-2SX_SE and S600WP-5GT-1SX_SE (I think) -- those two have one less SFP+ and 2.5GbE port respectively, and are only L2 web managed, which seems to have let them:
- switch out the RTL930x switch SoC (?) for a RTL8472
- use much less RAM (256MB -> ???)
- use a much smaller flash chip (8MB -> 2MB?)

the greatly increased flash size on this switch makes it a lot more feasible to run openwrt, which was one of the main results I picked this up (the others being the extra SFP+ port, console port, and SNMP support in the stock firmware)

but I guess work on openwrt support for RTL930x switches hasn't gotten to the point where it's good enough, so stock firmware it is

just one thing to note: the SFP+ ports seem to be really flaky with passive DACs, so you'd likely want an active one. it's possibly fixable with firmware upgrades so we'll see, but you'd likely have a better time just buying the 60% cheaper L2 web-managed switches instead

i've been kind of tempted to pick up something like a Pensando DSC-25 to experiment — they're pretty cool smartNICs/DPUs, and have a bunch of nice bits:
- 2x 25Gbps SFP28 slots
- hardware acceleration engines for crypto (AES? at 50Gbps), (de)compression, etc
- 4x Arm A72 cores clocked at 2.2GHz with 4GB of HBM (better than the CCR2004!)
- PCIe gen4 x16
- and possibly the most interesting part, P4 support!

for the uninitiated, P4 is a language that lets you define specific behaviors for packet processing applications — you can specify how to parse headers, what actions to perform based on headers/lookup tables/meters/counters, and when/how to update meters and counters

this means it becomes (quite) easy to define your own processing for packets, and have it run at wire speed!

much of the hardware that P4 supports are beefy switches (like the Wedge 100BFs, which give you 32-65 100G ports) that suck down a correspondingly crazy amount of power, but these cards make actual high-performance P4 applications much more accessible to those who don't have free electricity

anyway, i've previously taken a module at ETHZ which had labs where you had to write P4 programs to do things — basic L2 Ethernet switching, rudimentary firewalls, L3 routing, etc — but I got a bit caught up with slacking off and other modules, and regretfully didn't put in as much effort into it as I should've

perhaps it's time to start experimenting with P4 a bit more again (once I clear my backlog of random projects...) — I can just do that with mininet or something though, at least until I manage to implement something interesting in software, like switching, routing with wirespeed NAT offload, and ACL offload

it'll probably never get to the same level of polish as a typical router, but if it actually works reliably, it would be pretty tempting to get a DSC-25 and try to run the whole shebang with a second broadband connection for shits and giggles