5 ms·

It's not just bad business practice. At the company I work at, our anecdotal experience with Sonicwall products has just been shitty. You buy a router and you s

by k_sze 10y ago

It's not just bad business practice. At the company I work at, our anecdotal experience with Sonicwall products has just been shitty. You buy a router and you still need to pay extra to activate advanced features. What a shitty product. In contrast, we bought a whole bunch of Mikrotik's RouterBoards, they're really inexpensive and come with really powerful features that you don't need to pay extra for. We're starting to deploy them everywhere and we'll eventually phase out the shitty Sonicwall.

hrrsn 10y ago
While I don't have experience with Mikrotik, I've been really happy with the Ubiquiti gear I've installed.
- Alupis 10y ago
  Ubiquiti and Mikrotiks are a good match for each other. I've no experience with Ubiquiti's routing equipment, but their wireless devices (big backhaul dishes all the way down to the small office AP's) are fantastic. Backed by a Mikrotik, you have a very powerful and flexible package for a fraction of the cost of the competitors. Many WISP's use Ubiquiti wiresless equipment paired with Mikrotik's on the back end.
  - hrrsn 10y ago
    We use UniFi APs, Unifi Video and EdgeRouters/EdgeSwitches across all of our locations. Mikrotik was next on the list of things to check out, but in the 18 months since we've deployed them we haven't had a single issue.
    - Alupis 10y ago
      Yep, they make great hardware. I recommend attending one of their conferences if you ever get the chance. In the US, they usually have one annually in Las Vegas[1] (a lot of fun!, and they have one coming up soon in October). They also do conferences around the world[2]. It's been a few years since I attended one, but they used to (and might still) give out free products at the conferences. Usually it was a free sample of one of their new products. For example, I got an original UniFi device when they launched that product line. Installed it at home (way overkill for a small house!), and it's still working perfectly all these years later (has to be close to 5-6 years). Ubiquiti's conferences are a lot less expensive than the Mikrotik MUM's (conferences), although Mikrotik's offer a lot of training and what-not as well as normal conference talks. [1] http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences/Ubiquiti-World-Conference-NEXT-Announced-Oct-12th-Las-Vegas/td-p/1346966 http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences... [2] http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences/Ubiquiti-World-Conferences-in-Europe-Russia/td-p/1633410 http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences...
helloagainfren9 10y ago
Ugh, yeah. Ran into that same scenario while working with my third ever consulting client. The features we wanted were advertised as built in, with no (obvious) mention of it being a kind of "in app purchase". I felt like a total asshole telling this client we needed to shell out another few hundred bones. Then the thing ran like shit (need a lot of rebooting) and we replaced it after 9 months. Haven't looked at their garbage since.
fencepost 10y ago
Mikrotiks are remarkably powerful if you have knowledge and are willing and able to configure them properly. They are rock-solid routers with a great feature set, and we use them at almost all of our customers (except ones where we still haven't replaced older routers). Sonicwalls have a comparable feature set for hardware and basic networking, but also add the ability to do some UTM on the device - things like content filtering, antivirus, etc. for traffic passing through. There's nothing comparable that I've ever heard of on the Mikrotiks.
- Alupis 10y ago
  > things like content filtering, antivirus, etc. for traffic passing through In fairness, I believe these are subscription based services on the sonicwall (at least it was when I had a sonicwall). The same features would normally be implemented in different devices, and could still be with a mikrotik. And I don't see a reason why something couldn't be done on the mikrotik - either natively with some scripting, or by making use of the meta-router functionality (a linux vm running on the router which you can pass traffic too and have advanced stuff done)
- shwash 10y ago
  >They are rock-solid routers They are not rock-solid routers and frequently ship buggy releases, especially if you are using advanced features or their wireless offerings. They are great, they have a ton of powerful features, but don't use them unless you plan to spend time maintaining them and learning a lot about them. Manipulating their firewall rules is also a really cool way to intro yourself to iptables concepts.
thrillgore 10y ago
What are you running on the Mikrotiks? Monowall? pfSense?
legitster 10y ago
Paying for "active" features is pretty standard in enterprise though, especially since Meraki took off. It's all a product-as-service game. A lot of Enterprise companies are moving towards making the hardware free if you sign for the long term service packages.
czk 10y ago
Yeah, the PayWALL base features are very limited unless you purchase the "advanced" features packages, and there are a lot of them. The basic functionality included for free in a $40 linksys/cisco require a subscription fee to use on the SonicWALL. Some of the extra features like gateway av/content filtering can peg the CPU on the device, making the lower-end SonicWALLs not a very good purchase for anyone wanting to do more than forward some ports. They allow consumers to purchase DPI on the lower end devices but they lack the CPU power required, and turning it on can bring your entire network down.

by k_sze 10y ago

hrrsn 10y ago

While I don't have experience with Mikrotik, I've been really happy with the Ubiquiti gear I've installed.

Alupis 10y ago
Ubiquiti and Mikrotiks are a good match for each other. I've no experience with Ubiquiti's routing equipment, but their wireless devices (big backhaul dishes all the way down to the small office AP's) are fantastic. Backed by a Mikrotik, you have a very powerful and flexible package for a fraction of the cost of the competitors. Many WISP's use Ubiquiti wiresless equipment paired with Mikrotik's on the back end.
- hrrsn 10y ago
  We use UniFi APs, Unifi Video and EdgeRouters/EdgeSwitches across all of our locations. Mikrotik was next on the list of things to check out, but in the 18 months since we've deployed them we haven't had a single issue.
  - Alupis 10y ago
    Yep, they make great hardware. I recommend attending one of their conferences if you ever get the chance. In the US, they usually have one annually in Las Vegas[1] (a lot of fun!, and they have one coming up soon in October). They also do conferences around the world[2]. It's been a few years since I attended one, but they used to (and might still) give out free products at the conferences. Usually it was a free sample of one of their new products. For example, I got an original UniFi device when they launched that product line. Installed it at home (way overkill for a small house!), and it's still working perfectly all these years later (has to be close to 5-6 years). Ubiquiti's conferences are a lot less expensive than the Mikrotik MUM's (conferences), although Mikrotik's offer a lot of training and what-not as well as normal conference talks. [1] http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences/Ubiquiti-World-Conference-NEXT-Announced-Oct-12th-Las-Vegas/td-p/1346966 http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences... [2] http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences/Ubiquiti-World-Conferences-in-Europe-Russia/td-p/1633410 http://community.ubnt.com/t5/Ubiquiti-Events-and-Conferences...

helloagainfren9 10y ago

Ugh, yeah. Ran into that same scenario while working with my third ever consulting client. The features we wanted were advertised as built in, with no (obvious) mention of it being a kind of "in app purchase". I felt like a total asshole telling this client we needed to shell out another few hundred bones. Then the thing ran like shit (need a lot of rebooting) and we replaced it after 9 months. Haven't looked at their garbage since.

fencepost 10y ago

Mikrotiks are remarkably powerful if you have knowledge and are willing and able to configure them properly. They are rock-solid routers with a great feature set, and we use them at almost all of our customers (except ones where we still haven't replaced older routers). Sonicwalls have a comparable feature set for hardware and basic networking, but also add the ability to do some UTM on the device - things like content filtering, antivirus, etc. for traffic passing through. There's nothing comparable that I've ever heard of on the Mikrotiks.

Alupis 10y ago
> things like content filtering, antivirus, etc. for traffic passing through In fairness, I believe these are subscription based services on the sonicwall (at least it was when I had a sonicwall). The same features would normally be implemented in different devices, and could still be with a mikrotik. And I don't see a reason why something couldn't be done on the mikrotik - either natively with some scripting, or by making use of the meta-router functionality (a linux vm running on the router which you can pass traffic too and have advanced stuff done)
shwash 10y ago
>They are rock-solid routers They are not rock-solid routers and frequently ship buggy releases, especially if you are using advanced features or their wireless offerings. They are great, they have a ton of powerful features, but don't use them unless you plan to spend time maintaining them and learning a lot about them. Manipulating their firewall rules is also a really cool way to intro yourself to iptables concepts.

thrillgore 10y ago

What are you running on the Mikrotiks? Monowall? pfSense?

legitster 10y ago

Paying for "active" features is pretty standard in enterprise though, especially since Meraki took off. It's all a product-as-service game. A lot of Enterprise companies are moving towards making the hardware free if you sign for the long term service packages.

czk 10y ago

Yeah, the PayWALL base features are very limited unless you purchase the "advanced" features packages, and there are a lot of them. The basic functionality included for free in a $40 linksys/cisco require a subscription fee to use on the SonicWALL. Some of the extra features like gateway av/content filtering can peg the CPU on the device, making the lower-end SonicWALLs not a very good purchase for anyone wanting to do more than forward some ports. They allow consumers to purchase DPI on the lower end devices but they lack the CPU power required, and turning it on can bring your entire network down.