I've been a MikroTik fan since the beginning of my career some 15 years ago now. I have used the MikroTik router and Ubiquiti AP combination ever since. With that said, I can absolutely agree that their UX is terrible for anyone who doesn't specifically know how to configure a MikroTik router. The fact that you have to configure FQ-CoDel yourself and some bufferbloat protection isn't just a built-in option is absurd for anyone using it as a home router.
For me, the era of MikroTik is sort of... now.
Don't get me wrong, they make powerful and feature-complete stuff, but their UI sort of assumes you really know what you're doing. I don't know what I'm doing.
But my LLM does. I've been able to set up site-to-site VPNs with Mikrotik in fifteen minutes now, rather than the day-long exercise of googling and praying.
LLMs certainly help out - in my case, agent helped with searching through various web forums about how my ISP authenticates and sets up Internet connection.
Nevertheless let's give MikroTik, where it's due:
* new documentation page is much cleaner to browse
* tutorials on their YouTube channel are quite informative
* WinBox v4 has in my opinion much more pleasent UX/UI than v3
I’m going to admit it took me too many years to realize there is a Mac Winbox client - I assumed it was a windows only thing.
It was, until they came up with v4 around a year ago or so.
It's possible to run v3 under Wine on a Mac but it was kind of clunky. V4 is much nicer (also runs on Linux too).
Mikrotik makes great hardware that shines under Openvrt )
It’s been great for llm + cli usage on mikrotik
About 2 years ago I tried to use Mikrotik, as the router for my ATT Fiber.
It's royal pain.
Basic router setup is not hard.
Port forward to expose web server? Can be done after heavy docs&forum reading, but hair pinning never worked for me.
I checked their WiFi AP. It's UI is hard even for senior software engineer.
In the end I got opnSense installed in VM on Proxmox and it's my router for last 2 years.
I'm using 2 Mikrotik switches with their simplified UI to operate VLANs. Zero complains.
It should be doable by most software engineers. They did teach some basic CCNA course in the university as part of computer science studies and the concepts taught there should help a lot with configuring any router, including RouterOS. It could also be helpful to watch some guides on routing and firewall on Linux, since RouterOS is just Linux with a very specific UI on top.
It wasn’t terribly complicated for me but I seem to be built for the old Cisco style iOS.
But with an LLM it’s easier than falling off a log and the command line means it can do everything easily.
The router probably should work without relying on LLM:
I remember I misconfigured it, and can't really Google around or ask LLM to fix it, because my Internet is down now.
Of course I can use Internet on my phone, but it's not really convenient setup to ask LLM to troubleshoot the router.
Yeah, it's inconvenient when the [effectively] black-box router device that only the bot understands goes out to lunch, and takes access to the bot along with it.
But the degree of inconvenience is up to the beholder.
One way is using something like ChatGPT with a pocket supercomputer. It's tedious to get technical stuff done that way, but it can be accomplished. (For those who haven't tried it, the bot can be spooky-good at correctly interpreting cell phone photos of technical text on a screen. This saves a ton of transcription effort.)
Another way is with the phone's hotspot and just about any random computer. Laptops have wifi. Wifi dongles for desktops can be stupid-cheap, and it's useful to have a few scattered around. It works fine (unless one's hotspot data is ridiculously-limited, I guess).
The best way is probably by being prepared with procedural fall-back methods. Keep backups of your configs, and keep the recovery instructions with them. Test recovery; an untested backup isn't necessarily better than having no backup at all. Keep as many historical versions as one wishes, and automate it because procrastination is part of the human condition.
After that: When the router's config gets stuffed up, then the backups and the restore instructions are right there. Just pick an appropriate backup and use it.
We should probably be keeping backups of important stuff like that even in the absence of LLMs. Humans also err, and stuff does break, and what seemed obvious six months ago when we were in the groove might be impossible to remember when we need it today.
There is a safe mode built in. If you enable it and you loose connection to the router due to some misconfiguration, it will reset within 15 minutes to the point of where you started the safe mode session. Also if you mess up the IP layer, there is a chance that you can still connect and configure RouterOS through their WinBox program using the mac address.
Their products aren't really for consumers, maybe prosumers, but mainly smaller companies or ISPs that don't want to pay for Cisco.
Agreed. I tried Microtik. Seemed like it was written by DOS people from the 70s or 80s, made difficult on purpose.
I ended up switching to back to Ubiquti.
They run linux and offer ssh but with a custom shell that mirrors the "web shell" in usefulness.
Ubiquiti sucks nowadays but Microtik is simply insane.
I'm more than happy with VyOS. Throw that in proxmox and you have an open source JunOS with zero license headache.
I do use Mikrotik for 2.5g switching though, zero complaints.
I’ve been very happy with Mikrotik.
Chose them partly to reduce dependence on US tech too.
From some time, I had a though about getting my home-lab. Prior to that, I've decided to prepare my networking for it and ditch the router given by my ISP for MikroTik to optimise the network. It turned out it's not easy - why? Check it out on my latest blog post!
I can't read the nearly-white (or super-thin font) text on the white background.
Is that representative of using mikrotik hardware?
Apologies, fix should be live now
Wow, wasn't really expecting a response, but got a quick response along with a fix. Thank you, excellent support!
Nice detailed write-up too, and great explanatory diagrams.
and reader-mode doesn't show the text
I just got a backup ISP at home and connected fiber directly to Mikoritk using SFP dongle instead of the box provided by ISP.
Scripts on RouterOS handle network checks for failover, DNS updates, etc.
I got that Mikrotik home router 10 years ago and it is still performing great and handles most of the use cases without issues.
I hope there is a part 2, where they make sure the internet can't access their management interfaces...
Frustratingly I couldn’t find a Mikrotik that would offer me a few SFPs, and a 2.5 or two. I wanted ideally just 3 SFPs - two WAN for LB / Failover and one up to switch. 2.5g WAN would do but would rather SFP for future use.
UDM-SE it is for now.
What exactly did you need and how did https://mikrotik.com/product/crs305_1g_4s_in not do it? It says switch but it runs routerOS and can route at some speed - not 10G tho.
CRS is the switch product line and you would not believe how many professional network engineers do exactly as you have suggested and installed a CRS and asked why it locks up when routing.
crs305 will choke when you start asking it to do NAT. it's a switch. It should be able to hardware-route between VLANs but it's not made for "home router" duties.
Switched to Ubiquiti, I'm quite happy except for their lack of a sane MCP.
What's the state of FOSS licensing compliance? Have they repented?
Ubiquiti unifi has struggled to integrate routing as reliably and as well as the wireless and switching piece. Mikrotik router and unifi everything else has kind of been my go-to for at least 10 or 12y now.
Mikrotik is really a sweet spot for routers. It's feature-rich and it has a nice Web UI (or WinBox that is now cross-platform). And Mikrotik as a company is just amazing; they still support hardware that is almost 15 years old.
Other routers:
1. OpenWRT is a bit too basic, and updates are hit-and-miss.
2. Ubiquity is a bit too Apple-like, with its reliance on apps and integration.
3. Cisco is WAY too expensive, and too complicated to set up without having Cisco experience.
I'm now eagerly waiting for them to release the next generation of their routers. hEX Pro looks perfect to replace my aging CCR2004.
In which way is OpenWRT basic?
on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home.
I installed openwrt and then installed it on many mikrotik routers over the years. to be honest, not so much traditional routers (wifi+4-5 ports) but on ~10 port mikrotik switches for my infra.
i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)
> on the other hand i got a mikrotik a while back and while setting it up it was silently phoning home
Yes, I think it connects to the mikrotik cloud automatically to setup a usable external DNS to your device, but I believe access to it is turned off by default unless you turn it on.
https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/network-management/cloud/
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/197984280/Ba...
The other reason is for updates, it can check periodically for firmware updates.
But outside of that it's not like streaming network telemetry or anything like that.
> i've since been switching to zyxel gs1900-* switches (up to 48 ports with openwrt)
I’m sorry what? You can run openwrt on that line of switches?
I just have a 24-port one at home running stock firmware…
they have all kinds of stuff that runs openwrt
like:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0978TF8K3/
https://openwrt.org/toh/zyxel/gs1900-24hp_a1
or:
Check out Glinet.
Mikrotik is not a mere replacement for plug and play routers such as TP-Link and the like. It's a very advanced device offering countless networking features, including multiple VPN server options, advanced Layer 2/bridging/switching features - VLANs, nested VLANs (Q-in-Q), VXLAN, spanning tree protocols (STP, RSTP, MSTP), 802.1x authentication, bridge-based firewall and bridge-based NAT, data center bridging (a.k.a. "lossless Ethernet"). Advanced Layer 3 features such as BGP, policy routing, traffic shaping, VRRP, hardware layer 3 acceleration. Then containers, matter/thread protocols, mesh networking, advanced wi-fi features such as centrally-managed network (CAPSMAN), multiple/virtual access points, hotspots, and many many more. Advanced firewall for both IPv4 and IPv6. On top of that scripting, SSH server, NTP server, DNS cache. API client for advanced integrations, and built-in scheduler, packet sniffer for troubleshooting, safe mode for automatic rollbacks of recent changes in case when the admin gets cut off due to a dangerous change. It'd be really hard to enumerate all that RouterOS offers.
And all that is available from tiny home/SMB office devices starting at 40 USD, through dedicated wireless point to point bridges, to a big Ethernet switches/routers with 400G interfaces.
Of course it doesn't compete with high end NVIDIA Spectrum-X, Cisco or Juniper, but is good enough for 95% of networks.
It works great as a plug&play home/office router, too thanks to Quick Set, but for more sophisticated setups, a knowledge of networking protocols is mandatory. The more fancy setup, the more in-depth knowledge is required. Just like with programming and all stuff in life.
I love MikroTik, but ffs just let me install something else on it. SONiC or any other Linux would be awesome. I love their hardware, but their software is absolutely awful.
Is there any manufacturer out there who produces high quality hardware that is not locked down?
Sometimes having generic Linux capabilities on network equipment makes it hard to understand the configuration. On RouterOS you can just /export the configuration and read a single file. On Linux/SONiC there are multiple ways to do the same thing - you can do one part of configuration using ifupdown, then make some changes in systemd-networkd, a bunch of shell-script DHCP client hooks, rc.local, cron @reboot. Imagine being handed over a router that someone has fixed by doing some runtime reconfiguration (like `ip ro replace default via 192.168.0.1 advmss 1410`) that would vanish with almost no trace (except maybe .bash_histotry) when you reboot it - that won't be possible (without doing very special scheduler/script trickery) on RouterOS.
But if you still want it, MikroTik doesn't try too hard to prevent you from running modified software. You can port OpenWrt, and most modern MikroTik devices use modern enough Linux to use a device tree blob. Try pulling out a dtb from your firmware and ask an LLM to do the initial porting - just don't forget to backup your RouterOS license key first, they are device specific.
The opnSense Deciso boxes are very nice and open - if a bit on the expensive side.
https://shop.opnsense.com/product-categorie/hardware-applian...
> if a bit on the expensive side.
chokes on coffee
From my old-man, everything-is-stupidly-expensive point of view, this is my scale:
cheap side | reasonable | expensive side | Deciso boxes
I went with omada and I'm happy for now
They have an increasingly capable "simple" UI for casual users. It seems like improving it is on their roadmap, as they've been delivering vast improvements in functionality with each major release.
Also, shipping winbox on all platforms has been a huge QoL improvement