Photo by Florian Biedermann on Unsplash
OpenFlow-capable Zodiac WX access point
Controlled Landing
Zodiac FX is an affordable software-defined network (SDN)-enabled hardware switch [1] that was launched by Northbound Networks of Australia in a Kickstarter campaign. The company invited me to join a beta test for a new product: Zodiac WX [2], a wireless-enabled access point.
A special feature of the Zodiac WX is support for the OpenFlow protocol [3]. OpenFlow-based networks usually exist purely in software and use a protocol like Open vSwitch [4], for example, which lets you to control traffic between mobile clients and a fixed network much more flexibly than traditional routing and firewall rules allow.
Basics
The recently released access point is a stable device (Figures 1 and 2) that can be operated either with Power over Ethernet (PoE) or a power supply unit. The operating system runs on Zodiac LEDE, a temporary fork of the OpenWrt project – temporary because the two projects, LEDE and OpenWrt, have reunited under the name OpenWrt [5].
Figure 1: The Zodiac WX access
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