on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home.
I installed openwrt and then installed it on many mikrotik routers over the years. to be honest, not so much traditional routers (wifi+4-5 ports) but on ~10 port mikrotik switches for my infra.
i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)
> on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home
Yes, I think it connects to the mikrotik cloud automatically to setup a usable external DNS to your device, but I believe access to it is turned off by default unless you turn it on.
https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/network-management/cloud/
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/197984280/Ba...
The other reason is for updates, it can check periodically for firmware updates.
But outside of that it's not like streaming network telemetry or anything like that.
> i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)
I’m sorry what? You can run openwrt on that line of switches?
I just have a 24-port one at home running stock firmware…
they have all kinds of stuff that runs openwrt
like:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0978TF8K3/
https://openwrt.org/toh/zyxel/gs1900-24hp_a1
or:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TC3VJ61
https://openwrt.org/toh/hwdata/zyxel/zyxel_xgs1250-12_b1
lovely, thank you!