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Big supporter of Mikrotik here, it’s a perfect middle ground between consumer “crap”, and $10,000 enterprise network equipment. Rolled out a 10gbit / 25gbit ne

Big supporter of Mikrotik here, it’s a perfect middle ground between consumer “crap”, and $10,000 enterprise network equipment. Rolled out a 10gbit / 25gbit network at home. My biggest complaints are: * Wireless is really difficult to get “decent speeds”. I also have my ISP’s router and a Draytek at home, these easily do 500mbit, and it’s nearly impossible to get my router board to do the same. When asking support there’s mainly a lot of hand-waving “you’ll never get better than 100mbit anywhere anyway”, etc. Even if other router vendors use hacks / cheats to achieve what they do, I would want an explanation what exactly it is they’re doing, and why Mikrotik can’t do that. * I know their Linux Kernel supports certain features, I would really like an “escape hatch” so I can just run traffic shaping commands manually. Eg if I want to use RED with ECN, the lack of a UI checkbox shouldn’t be the limiting factor; * Upgrades while being in their development branch has been a big pain, many times losing crucial configurations; I guess this is fair game when I’m on the beta channel. * Hardware is a bit underpowered for my needs, but I guess that’s why enterprise equipment is 10x - 50x as expensive. Doing traffic shaping on anything more than 1gbit is pretty much impossible; probably the best solution is to use some dedicated hardware with a whole bunch of network cards inside.

iso1210 5y ago
You can always run routeros on X86 hardware. I think the problem with things like mangle rules run into. Had loss and a hell of a lot of reorders at just 500mbit through a CCR1036 the other week, disabled 100 or so mangle rules and it vanished, but from looking at other routers I think it's more of a limit in the linux kernel (perhaps just the 2.6 one). Maybe routeros7.1 will be better, something to test in the coming weeks. 10/25 feels like a CCR2004? Or are you just talking switching. If routing remember it isn't full bandwidth - the 170gbit of ports is squished into 2x25 before hitting the CPU[0]. Not sure how much is offloaded to the PIPE. [0] https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/CCR2004-1G-12Splus2XS_200459.png https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/CCR2004-1G-12Splus2XS_2004...
- stingraycharles 5y ago
  > 10/25 feels like a CCR2004? Or are you just talking switching. That’s exactly right. Thanks for the tip that things get squished into 2x25gbit before reaching the CPU; this effectively means that anything that isn’t offloaded to the hardware is limited by “just” 2x25GBit. Is my understanding also correct that this would be the case for when traffic needs to go from the SFP+ ports to the SFP28 ones? Regardless, what I really wanted to do (mostly as an experiment) is use QoS to prioritize iSCSI and others; the problem I’m running into is that the CPUs are just not able to do that that fast. I think the only solution to this problem would be to use an x86 machine with a bunch of Mellanox cards in it.
Arnt 5y ago
It's possible that they still haven't merged the smallish patch described here: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-hoiland-jorgensen.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-h... The hardware is underpowered because they optimise for people who deploy a hundred routers on mountaintops, with excellent lines of sight but poor access for replacement. Underclocking severely helps reliability.
james_in_the_uk 5y ago
Top tip - if your Mikrotik APs will run OpenWRT, do it. https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/common https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/common Standalone wireless on Mikrotik is bad. CapsMan is even worse as it seems to hobble some of the standalone settings. Mikrotik are good at engineering routers but bad at engineering Wifi drivers. I tried every which way to get Mikrotik wifi to work well, at reasonable speed, without dropping packets when roaming. No dice. Now I have three HAP AC running OpenWRT, connected to a CCR for switching and a HEX S for routing, the latter two still running RouterOS 6. 5 VLANs, PoE, queues, several forwarded services, Solid as a rock. (I've said it now... massive network wobble likely on the way).
- oynqr 5y ago
  The HEX S is really nice for OpenWRT too :)

iso1210 5y ago

You can always run routeros on X86 hardware. I think the problem with things like mangle rules run into. Had loss and a hell of a lot of reorders at just 500mbit through a CCR1036 the other week, disabled 100 or so mangle rules and it vanished, but from looking at other routers I think it's more of a limit in the linux kernel (perhaps just the 2.6 one). Maybe routeros7.1 will be better, something to test in the coming weeks. 10/25 feels like a CCR2004? Or are you just talking switching. If routing remember it isn't full bandwidth - the 170gbit of ports is squished into 2x25 before hitting the CPU[0]. Not sure how much is offloaded to the PIPE. [0] https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/CCR2004-1G-12Splus2XS_200459.png https://i.mt.lv/cdn/product_files/CCR2004-1G-12Splus2XS_2004...

stingraycharles 5y ago
> 10/25 feels like a CCR2004? Or are you just talking switching. That’s exactly right. Thanks for the tip that things get squished into 2x25gbit before reaching the CPU; this effectively means that anything that isn’t offloaded to the hardware is limited by “just” 2x25GBit. Is my understanding also correct that this would be the case for when traffic needs to go from the SFP+ ports to the SFP28 ones? Regardless, what I really wanted to do (mostly as an experiment) is use QoS to prioritize iSCSI and others; the problem I’m running into is that the CPUs are just not able to do that that fast. I think the only solution to this problem would be to use an x86 machine with a bunch of Mellanox cards in it.

Arnt 5y ago

It's possible that they still haven't merged the smallish patch described here: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-hoiland-jorgensen.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc17/atc17-h... The hardware is underpowered because they optimise for people who deploy a hundred routers on mountaintops, with excellent lines of sight but poor access for replacement. Underclocking severely helps reliability.

james_in_the_uk 5y ago

Top tip - if your Mikrotik APs will run OpenWRT, do it. https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/common https://openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/common Standalone wireless on Mikrotik is bad. CapsMan is even worse as it seems to hobble some of the standalone settings. Mikrotik are good at engineering routers but bad at engineering Wifi drivers. I tried every which way to get Mikrotik wifi to work well, at reasonable speed, without dropping packets when roaming. No dice. Now I have three HAP AC running OpenWRT, connected to a CCR for switching and a HEX S for routing, the latter two still running RouterOS 6. 5 VLANs, PoE, queues, several forwarded services, Solid as a rock. (I've said it now... massive network wobble likely on the way).

oynqr 5y ago
The HEX S is really nice for OpenWRT too :)