"Dennis Burgess" <dmburgess@linktechs.net> writes:
Mikrotik really relies on its list of consultants and trainers, these are all outside companies, yes such as mine, that provide the higher class of "support" than MikroTik own e-mail. . While their e-mail does have a lack of responsiveness, I was told the volume that they do get form other parts of the world, not saying that's an excuse, but it is what it is.
This wasn't a support issue; it was bug reports. Things such as: * your CLI has an incomplete implementation of the Emacs key bindings (detailed list elided here on nanog@for brevity's sake but if you've ever used Mikrotik kit and are a seasoned CLI user on C and J platforms you know what I'm talking about); please consider fixing or adopting libcli, gnu readline, or somesuch in future releases. * your GRE implementation always has a protocol type of 0x0800 in the GRE header even when it is forwarding an IPv6 packet (packet dumps attached). * ssh sessions crash when ServerAliveInterval SSH application layer keepalives kick off. See http://www.openssh.org/faq.html section 2.12 or http://www.kehlet.cx/articles/129.html To replicate: ssh -o ServerAliveInterval=120 admin@myrouter (to their credit this was eventually fixed in 5.x - this behavior was observed in 5.0rc4) * /ping and /tool/traceroute fail for a DNS name for which there is no A record, only an AAAA record (although both commands will accept an IPv6 address as digits). This is still a problem today. * When trying to remove files, it seems that they are not removed by number, but rather by name, despite what the online help says. There was more stuff along those lines. "Thanks for the bug reports; I made sure to open tickets for them but we can't commit to when or if they'll get addressed due to competing priorities but they've absolutely been documented" would have been a fine reply; I completely understand the Real World considerations involved and that my priorities were not necessarily their priorities. Unfortunately the return email left me with the impression that nobody cared and that they were not equipped to handle issues brought to their attention by people with field experience, hence the unfavorable parallels to the "big guys". Note that this has not kept my from speccing their kit when the task calls for something that's surprisingly good considering how inexpensive it is! So maybe from a business perspective they were entirely correct to blow me off - at least where it comes to "revenue attributable to Rob Seastrom", the negative impact has been nil. -r