We use a lot of Mikrotik in our network. They are fantastic little routers as long as you remember that they are not Cisco/Juniper/whatever. In other words, you pay a few hundred bucks, you get something worth at least that much. But don't put it head to head against a $10k router. Support is technically sound, but you have to email Latvia and then wait for the time difference to get a response. If you expect to pay $100 for a router and then get prompt, courteous, 24/7 tech support, you will be disappointed. :) We use their routers mostly for end user gateways doing QOS. They do a superb job of this. I wouldn't particularly want them as network edge devices or core routers; they will choke up if the PPS rate gets too high and you are doing any kind of packet mangling. There have been a lot of bugs in various versions of RouterOS, but the current (5.8?) OS seems pretty good. They added IPv6 support and fixed a ton of bugs. OSPF implementation was buggy before OS5, but seems to be relatively stable since we upgraded. BGP works fine but is perhaps less feature rich than Cisco/Zebra. Joseph Alyrica Networks Inc / www.alyrica.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com> To: "Leigh Porter" <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> Cc: "nanog list" <nanog@nanog.org> Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:52 AM Subject: Re: Any recommended router. They are reliable and have good support.
Leigh Porter <leigh.porter@ukbroadband.com> writes:
Has anybody had experience of mikrotik support? Is it any good? Any thoughts about the time to fix bugs?
I have dealt with Mikrotik support. They were easily comparable to [CJ]TAC. Which is to say "guy was pleasant and courteous, I could tell through the language barrier that he wasn't really interested in addressing my problems or understanding them, and eventually I got exasperated and figured out a work-around".
That said, it's easy to exceed expectations when you've spent something like $70 on a router that does five ports of gigabit ethernet.
Several dot releases after that little ordeal, at least one of my laundry list of problems (ssh connections blew up if you are using application layer keepalives) seems to have gotten fixed, at least in 5.8, with nary a mention in the release notes so I assume it was a matter of syncing the codebase to whatever they run for an ssh server. Still no fix for the "your CLI only partially implements Emacs key binds, please try libcli.a which is LGPL instead", which is annoying since this shortcoming is really up in your grill whenever you're logged into the router. Still can't traceroute to an IPv6 host by name, only by number. Dunno if they figured out what the "G" in "GRE" stands for yet and started allowing protocols other than IPv4 (and ethertypes other than 0x0800) in a GRE tunnel - can't be bothered to test it out since I managed to get 6in4 tunneling working instead. There are more random gripes, but you get the idea - routeros definitely shows a certain lack of polish but can get the job done for low-end stuff at a very acceptably low-end price.
All in all, despite the gripes it's worth your time to check out. Don't let the folks who sing their praises get your hopes up too much but hey, for pocket change invested? Pretty decent. There are some good surprises in there too, like putative support for 32 bit ASNs (haven't tested that myself) and scriptability that will allow you to send TSIG-signed dns update messages periodically for when you have customers to support that are on the far end of a non-sticky DHCP.
-r