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As someone who’s a home networking enthusiast, and has too much Mikrotik gear at home, I can kind of understand what they’re coming from. RouterOS has the usabi
by stingraycharles 5y ago
As someone who’s a home networking enthusiast, and has too much Mikrotik gear at home, I can kind of understand what they’re coming from. RouterOS has the usability of “enterprise-grade” network equipment (meaning it’s arcane and non-intuitive), but at the same time has lots and lots of half-working features.
I simply cannot believe how terrible their IPv6 support is (still no connection tracking!), and plenty of weird glitches, etc.
But! Their hardware is very reasonably priced, and an excellent gateway to “real” networking equipment for the hobbyist. It’s unfair to compare it against Juniper and the likes: yes, it’s much better, but yes, the products are also 10x - 100x as expensive.
While everything that’s done in RouterOS can also be done under vanilla Linux, I buy Mikrotik precisely because I don’t want to build a custom Linux router. I want something that comes with a GUI, and I won’t have to spend too much time setting up.
Having said that, I would absolutely kill for an “escape” Linux shell. I know that RED supports ECN in Linux, please allow me to use it!
- blibble 5y ago> I simply cannot believe how terrible their IPv6 support is (still no connection tracking!) I see a list of connections under "IPv6 firewall" under the connections tab? > and plenty of weird glitches this bit however I agree with
- stingraycharles 5y agoI don’t think that contrack based mangle rules work, though. If it does, it must be a recent fix (I’m on ROS7.1)
- iso1210 5y ago7.x is still effectively in beta, there are many features that don't work yet, last time I checked neither multicast nor bfd were working.
- walrus01 5y agothe idea that somebody thought to ship to production release a router operating system with broken bfd is amazing.
- Alupis 5y agoWell, they didn't - not really at least. 7.1 is only required on their brand new router targeted at enthusiast home users. The RB5009, which specifically says it's targeting home labs and explicitly came with the caveat of 7.1 being the minimum version and there is no LTS in the 7.x branch as-of yet. This is the only product that requires the 7.x branch. Everything else ships with 6.48.x LTS or 6.49.x Stable. Nearly all serious users are using the LTS branch. The 7.x branch is well known within the RouterOS community to not be "production" ready... although that's where new features and stuff are going. It will be, one day.
- Alupis 5y agoThere is a chart with 7.x routing protocol statuses available here[1]. [1] https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/v7+Routing+Protocol+Status https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/v7+Routing+Protoc...
- sleepydog 5y ago> still no connection tracking! Seriously? Is it not possible to have stateful firewall rules for IPv6 traffic? Or is it just NAT that won't work (I don't care about NAT, NAT can die)? I was considering getting a microtik router but this would be a dealbreaker.
- justsomehnguy 5y agoYou can use CHR to test all features (at least non-hardware dependent): https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=18350234 https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=...