![mikrotik rb3011 mikrotik rb3011](https://5.imimg.com/data5/FU/HZ/JD/SELLER-97182221/mikrotik-rb3011uias-rm-500x500.jpg)
Luckily it has an RJ45 serial console port on the back, and a reasonably featured bootloader that can manage to boot via tftp over the network. The first step was to get something booting on the router. I could move things around such that they ran on the house server, but I consider them core services and as a result am happier with them on the router.
![mikrotik rb3011 mikrotik rb3011](https://i.imgur.com/M8Ii6AU.jpg)
I’m comfortable configuring firewalling and routing at a Linux command line, and I run some additional services on the router like my MQTT broker, and mqtt-arp, my wifi device presence monitor. I did try out RouterOS to start with, but I didn’t find it particularly compelling. As an added bonus a friend said he had one he wasn’t using, and was happy to sell it to me for a bargain price. I wasn’t particularly interested in running RouterOS on it (the provided software), but that’s based on Linux and there was some work going on within OpenWRT to add support, so it seemed like a worthwhile platform to experiment with (what, you expected this to be about me buying an off the shelf device and using it with only the supplied software?). There’s 1G RAM and 128MB NAND flash, as well as a USB3 port. Looking around I found the MikroTik RB3011UiAS-RM, which is a rack mountable device with 10 GigE ports (plus an SFP slot) and a dual core Qualcomm IPQ8064 ARM powering it. I wanted to reduce the number of devices, and ideally upgrade to something that could scale once I decide to upgrade my FTTP service speed. That mean I had a router, a switch and a PoE injector all in close proximity. Also my wifi is handled by a UniFi, which takes its power via Power-over-Ethernet.
![mikrotik rb3011 mikrotik rb3011](https://pictures-nigeria.jijistatic.com/40457235_empicstar-mikrotik-rb3011_863x559.jpg)
However the FTTP ONT meant I was using up an additional ethernet port on the router, and I was already short, so I ended up with a GigE switch in use as well. I’m still on an 80M/20M service, so it’s no faster than my old VDSL FTTC connection was, and as a result for a long time I continued to use my HomeHub 5A running OpenWRT. I upgraded my home internet connection to fibre (FTTP) last October.