Hello everyone.
Please tell me, where can I find a free Gigabit Ethernet Switch for 5-8 ports?
I don’t see any Gigabit Ethernet Switches on the GNu page Products | RYF .
Please recommend options 
.
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I have the one from ThinkPenguin; I recommend their team for most products
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Thank you very much for your answer.
The problem is that such a company does not exist as a manufacturer, ThinkPenguin does not produce routers, Gigabit Ethernet Switch, computers, USB adapters, etc.
They resell. Also, I don’t see a separate Gigabit Ethernet Switch field here hardware - h-node.org
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What about: 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch (TPE-8PTGIGSWIT2) | ThinkPenguin.com
or more generally: Networking Gear For GNU / Linux | ThinkPenguin.com
?
But maybe you mean that they don’t manufacture the equipment that they sell and therefore you can’t be sure about the nature of any software therein. (I mean maybe ThinkPenguin can get assurances from the manufacturer but ThinkPenguin might just have to trust those assurances. You could contact ThinkPenguin and ask.)
On the other hand, an unmanaged switch typically has invisible firmware - so it becomes philosophical and opaque as to whether it is “libre”. The switch might just have an ASIC and no firmware at all. Or it might not be that way but there is no way to read or write the firmware via the network anyway.
For a managed switch, the question would definitely come up as to whether the firmware is “libre”.
So were you after managed or unmanaged?
Or “libre” might have referred to the hardware itself?
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Thank you for your answer.
I’ve also done a little bit of research on this issue, and when choosing a switch, we, the users, need to choose an unmanaged switch. I will write a few models here so that other users, when looking for the answer to this question, will find it here.
These are examples.
NETGEAR (GS305v3) 5-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch
TP-Link (LS105G) 5-Ports Gigabit Ethernet Switch
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?
It depends entirely on your requirements. I have mostly managed switches - because that’s what I need. I accept that that means that most of my switches overtly run blackbox software. That is not the ideal world but it is the world in which we live.
My guess is that most home users would be well-served by an unmanaged switch but among the hundreds of makes/models of unmanaged GbE switches, we really have no idea what goes on inside them i.e. blackboxes.
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You might find the following topic from 21 months ago helpful:
some of that information is still relevant to this topic.
long live libre hardware!
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There are some great switches and routers with no OS designed for running openwrt or similar, I have to look for ones with risc-v CPUs but that is becoming available now in the last few years. everything else will have blob bin stuff to train memory, start the CPU, or such. If not available now it is soon to have a real pure switch or router. If you want good performance especially if you are bridging via VPN memory and fast CPU are key.
The implicit requirement of a “libre” switch is that you are not required to install nonfree software to use it. With a managed switch, it is almost guaranteed in practice that at some point the manufacturer requires the customer to update the firmware as a condition for the manufacturer-guaranteed operation of the switch.
Thus, being required to update that software means being required to install nonfree software. This renders managed switched practically “nonlibre” for the user in comparison to unmanaged switches despite both operating on nonfree designs internally. Hence, the following conclusion comes.
Anecdotally, having an unmanaged switch was my only defence against the tech support of a switch manufacturer who insisted that I have to update its firmware to resolve my issue, which happened to be not caused by the switch after all but by a faulty device on the network.
TSW200, while similar to TSW202, is an unmanaged switch. This fits my use case perfectly because TSW200 does not expose HTTP, SSH, or other services reducing the attack surface and relieving me from firmware maintenance and configuration administration. The wiki pages for TSW200 mention no way for the end user to flash firmware.
By the way, I can totally recommend TSW200 industrial switch manufactured by Teltonika Networks in Lithuania for its high quality and reliable operation. This particular model is a PoE switch, but they have many models.
Of course, I would prefer a switch with free design and free software, but I could not find one.
I had an impression that, for the switch or router to be efficient and reach gigabit speeds, the switching or routing must be implemented in hardware on a chip instead of using the CPU. So, there will be some firmware required to use that specialized chip even on a RISC-V switch, woln’t it? As an example, there is Milk-V Vega, which is a RISC-V “open source” 10 gigabit network switch.
However, the Fisilink switch hardware is controlled by a proprietary binary of which Milk-V has not released the source code.
probably true, but I like to tie several systems together over a large geographic area via a secure VPN intranet as well as routing to public internet and so far I have not found a good openwrt friendly ASIC router or router with GB switch circuit on the board offered at least at my pricepoint for faster VPN. I have not tried too hard though.