5 ms·

On a tangentially related note I recently found another manufacturer that is very similar to MikroTik: Teltonika. They are also based in a baltic state (Lithuan

by mastax 3y ago

On a tangentially related note I recently found another manufacturer that is very similar to MikroTik: Teltonika. They are also based in a baltic state (Lithuania) and manufacture a range of inexpensive mostly-commercial-focused networking products. Their firmware is pretty open, and they provide a pretty good SDK that can build all the open source bits of the firmware and can be used to develop third party applications for their routers. I'm evaluating their RUTX11 LTE/WiFi router as an in-vehicle router for a commercial application. I'm reasonably impressed so far. Their firmware strategy seems to be going for implementing every feature under the sun, so I'd be a bit concerned about the robustness of some of the edge cases, but no problems yet. (This is not intended to imply "move off of MikroTik to Teltonika because of this security issue" at all, I just needed to get this out of my system)

cookiengineer 3y ago
Losely related: I can recommend the Linksys WRT series. These are all OpenWRT compatible and can easily be reflashed. They're also BPF/XDP compatible, though they obviously have no netronome smartNICs in there. Also, golang can easily cross-compile to them, and the static binaries work without issues in case you want to do more with it :)
iso1631 3y ago
I used their rut to provide 2 paths out for comms to 10 locations around the UK for a high profile Outside Broadcast a couple of weeks ago. The RUTs have decent modems and took two sim cards, and could be configured with routing policies to effectively have two independent paths out. Used a mikrotik for the third off some venue network which varied depending on the location. I set up a wireguard tunnel from the RUT so I could have remote management to the rut and to the tieline gateway providing the comms over one of the sims, in addition to my normal tunnel from the mikrotik. In Dover sim coverage was patchy, as was the "ethernet line" (which I believe was a 60G wireless link across the harbour). Just before the broadcast started the "ethernet" circuit dropped off, as did one of the sims. The other sim had fortunatly managed to connect to a French 4G provider. Another location had issues with the venue internet so again rut to the rescue, but another location had no 4g coverage at all so wired did the job. Those ruts are now on the way to be in use at a site near Poole to do 3 sim cards worth of connectivity to some remote locations. I really like the wireguard connection, makes it easy to see what's going, and they're a nice little box anyway. Configuration isn't good though -- a mikrotik has a nice simple "/export terse" to see how it's configured and easilly apply. The Ruts config is spread all over the file system and it's not obvious to me yet how to manage that. There's some bugs in the gui too around routing tables too.
ilyt 3y ago
> Their firmware strategy seems to be going for implementing every feature under the sun, so I'd be a bit concerned about the robustness of some of the edge cases, but no problems yet. in what way ? If it is just "let's expose every feature of linux kernel underneath and add some" I wouldn't be worried. I think (not sure) RouterOS reimplemented a lot of networking for whatever reason instead of just using Linux facilities, and that bug would suggest that, as otherwise it would also show up in vanilla linux (I guess it could be in userspace tool not in kernel?) > On a tangentially related note I recently found another manufacturer that is very similar to MikroTik: Teltonika. How's CLI? The one thing that makes me steer away from Mikrotik is its CLI. It is different enough from anything else networking and different from linux commands that I have zero intuition for it. So I just use plain linux My go-to was PCEngines APU2 but AMD no longer supports/produces CPU it uses so it is near-discontinued
- bastard_op 3y ago
  I just recently migrated myself personally from Fortigate to Opnsense, where I did look a bit into Mikrotik as #network irc folk tend to love it. Mikrotik to me seemed just odd as well (particularly emphasis to use a thick client app), and I've installed and run almost every (other) major vendor out there. In the end I opted not to use yet another completely foreign dialect router/firewall, at least opnsense is freebsd, which I can work with ie close enough to linux and entirely accessible. Vendor rep is important. I really don't trust Fortinet much anymore in moving off them, when they have security problems, they're usually pretty bad/catastrophic, and you NEVER want to NOT have updates on their kit if facing the internet (which mine was eos). Cisco isn't much better. I don't see Mikrotik in the news very often, which I'd take as a win at least and have compelling enough hardware/pricing I'd see this is a relatively small thing soon patched.
  - stephen_g 3y ago
    I've also been using Opnsense in some networks recently, I like it so far. Some of the networks I work with have some older Mikrotik gear (which the Opnsense appliances are going to replace), I've just never really quite liked it - it has every feature under the sun but the interface always just seemed a bit janky to me. I might be judging a book by its cover but the software has just never felt solid...

by mastax 3y ago

cookiengineer 3y ago

Losely related: I can recommend the Linksys WRT series. These are all OpenWRT compatible and can easily be reflashed. They're also BPF/XDP compatible, though they obviously have no netronome smartNICs in there. Also, golang can easily cross-compile to them, and the static binaries work without issues in case you want to do more with it :)

iso1631 3y ago

I used their rut to provide 2 paths out for comms to 10 locations around the UK for a high profile Outside Broadcast a couple of weeks ago. The RUTs have decent modems and took two sim cards, and could be configured with routing policies to effectively have two independent paths out. Used a mikrotik for the third off some venue network which varied depending on the location. I set up a wireguard tunnel from the RUT so I could have remote management to the rut and to the tieline gateway providing the comms over one of the sims, in addition to my normal tunnel from the mikrotik. In Dover sim coverage was patchy, as was the "ethernet line" (which I believe was a 60G wireless link across the harbour). Just before the broadcast started the "ethernet" circuit dropped off, as did one of the sims. The other sim had fortunatly managed to connect to a French 4G provider. Another location had issues with the venue internet so again rut to the rescue, but another location had no 4g coverage at all so wired did the job. Those ruts are now on the way to be in use at a site near Poole to do 3 sim cards worth of connectivity to some remote locations. I really like the wireguard connection, makes it easy to see what's going, and they're a nice little box anyway. Configuration isn't good though -- a mikrotik has a nice simple "/export terse" to see how it's configured and easilly apply. The Ruts config is spread all over the file system and it's not obvious to me yet how to manage that. There's some bugs in the gui too around routing tables too.

ilyt 3y ago

> Their firmware strategy seems to be going for implementing every feature under the sun, so I'd be a bit concerned about the robustness of some of the edge cases, but no problems yet. in what way ? If it is just "let's expose every feature of linux kernel underneath and add some" I wouldn't be worried. I think (not sure) RouterOS reimplemented a lot of networking for whatever reason instead of just using Linux facilities, and that bug would suggest that, as otherwise it would also show up in vanilla linux (I guess it could be in userspace tool not in kernel?) > On a tangentially related note I recently found another manufacturer that is very similar to MikroTik: Teltonika. How's CLI? The one thing that makes me steer away from Mikrotik is its CLI. It is different enough from anything else networking and different from linux commands that I have zero intuition for it. So I just use plain linux My go-to was PCEngines APU2 but AMD no longer supports/produces CPU it uses so it is near-discontinued

bastard_op 3y ago
I just recently migrated myself personally from Fortigate to Opnsense, where I did look a bit into Mikrotik as #network irc folk tend to love it. Mikrotik to me seemed just odd as well (particularly emphasis to use a thick client app), and I've installed and run almost every (other) major vendor out there. In the end I opted not to use yet another completely foreign dialect router/firewall, at least opnsense is freebsd, which I can work with ie close enough to linux and entirely accessible. Vendor rep is important. I really don't trust Fortinet much anymore in moving off them, when they have security problems, they're usually pretty bad/catastrophic, and you NEVER want to NOT have updates on their kit if facing the internet (which mine was eos). Cisco isn't much better. I don't see Mikrotik in the news very often, which I'd take as a win at least and have compelling enough hardware/pricing I'd see this is a relatively small thing soon patched.
- stephen_g 3y ago
  I've also been using Opnsense in some networks recently, I like it so far. Some of the networks I work with have some older Mikrotik gear (which the Opnsense appliances are going to replace), I've just never really quite liked it - it has every feature under the sun but the interface always just seemed a bit janky to me. I might be judging a book by its cover but the software has just never felt solid...