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.
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
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.
I did not know about it, but it's actually linked in the LLM friendly doc [1].
Seems like some rules around being able to use parsing tools such as regex, and general formatting.
That's also my problem. My colleague tells me that it's very easy to setup, but he's a network engineer and knows what things are.
Mikrotik seems to operate in an interesting area between high-end home-labing and the SME market. Without preexisting networking knowledge at a certain level, their documentation isn't all that helpful. I'm sure you can learn from the documentation, YouTube videos and trial and error, but if like me you get a few hours once in a while to take down your home network and get it back up it's going to take a while to gain the required knowledge. I really want an addition internet connection so I can play with this stuff.
On the negative, I'd say it's pretty clear that Mikrotik want you do buy training. It feels like some information is withheld by those with the certifications and Mikrotik and the UI isn't helping you much to figure out stuff on your own.
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
Plus the routeros supports exporting all settings directly as text file. so you can really export the whole system, send it to llm and ask it to edit. install the new rule.
in worst case you just install the old rule back if it fuck up, no really damage can happen.
I use tp-link everything. I have all of them connected to self-hosted Omada controller in docker. Works like a breeze, including notifications. Used MikroTik before but "the dude" or whatever is called now was hit and miss. Probably you don't need it anymore if get llm to configure it.
I absolutely loved vyos but after their repeated hostility towards non paying users I moved to mikrotik for my routers (already had mikrotik switches).
First they stopped publishing LTS images, telling users to build from source. So people built gh repos you could clone and build with actions. Then they stopped making lts builds reproducible and told free users to use the preview release. But the preview release doesn’t get security updates. So if there’s a vulnerability you’re SOL until the next release which could be months. Not really tenable for an edge device for me and I’m not very interested in being a user of a product that does not want me.
Isn’t it a subscription? And super expensive? $3k/year/device was the cheapest thing I saw on their site or $12k/5 years. 25k/year for an MSP. On a 5 year cycle we’d need to manage thousands on devices to make it more attractive than pfsense (cost wise).
I really wanted to try it a few years ago but they seem like just another tech company that only wants millionaire customers.
One thing that frustrates me about MikroTik and OpenWRT too, is a lot of things require multiple steps to set up, like adding a port forward with hairpin isn't just one click, adding a VLAN requires adding stuff in like 5+ different places.
I really liked using Opnsense before I switched to Openwrt and I always want to go back, because it was just so much more streamlined and easy to configure from a 'geek but not a network engineer' perspective.
I use a mikrotik at home, and I always get a review from Claude after making config changes.
I actually used to be a network engineer (many decades and career reinventions ago), and I appreciate that Mikrotik exposes all of the layers and connections between them.
But damn if Claude doesn’t always find something I got wrong in the config.
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.
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.
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.
Just use linux! Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could truly own your router?
It's a great educational experience I would recommend to anyone interested in networking. Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.
> Grab debian, grab a system with 2 NICs, make it your router/firewall/gateway.
The problem with this (assuming you meant a generic (x86?) system) is that you won't get wire speed processing (no hardware offloading), so network performance will suffer. Unless you buy a dedicated router board (which is typically ARM), like say something like the Banana Pi BPI-R4. But installing/configuring a standard distro line Debian for such a board would be a PITA (if you want to do it right and set it up optimally), so you're better off using a dedicated router distro like OpenWRT.
I’ve not tried with 10gbps or faster links, but since we’re talking home use my success with 2.5 gbps links on standard amd64 hardware would suggest you’re wrong.
Modern CPUs are quite capable. The problem isn’t performance, but power use.
That's bogus unless you're talking above 10G, in which case the only things typically doing wire level performance are expensive and sold by vendors like Cisco, Juniper or Arista (and maybe it's higher than 10G now). Frankly, the vast majority of ARM based routers, unless you go out of your way, are garbage. Any x86 built in the last 15+ years with a NIC that's also not trash _will_ push at least 1G routed with a non-trivial firewall on a modern Linux kernel no problem. I've still got half a dozen PC Engines APU2 boards that unequivocally will get right at 1G on Debian Trixie; newer ewaste like Dell Wyse thin clients or Optiplexes would absolutely smoke those boards on performance.
Setting up a router with Debian is really kind of overstated in terms of difficulty, and frankly half of everything wraps Debian anyways (looking at you Ubiquiti/Vyatta), so why learn someone else's half cooked configuration language when you can just do the real thing.
Is this a problem with home networks? I have pfsense installed on some mini PC I bought off Amazon.
Setting up Debian as a router might take some effort but it's certainly not difficult. Enabling routing is a single line config change, install dhcpd and you're almost there. I'd certainly recommend the router OS.
I’ve been running a Supermicro X10SLH-LN6TF as my router, and it’s very well suited for the job. Power use is very high for a home router, but reasonable for a 1U router - especially considering the era it’s from and its capabilities (routing 5-8Gbps per stream depending on firewall config, able to handle a couple active streams, and line rate routing with no firewall).
I wouldn’t suggest anyone buy something like this today for home use, but 6 years ago when I purchased it there were not many 10GbE routers to be had period, let alone for the price ($300 roughly if I remember correctly ). Even considering the cost of power over the last 6 years, I still come out much cheaper than if I’d bought something more power efficient new at the time.
Bingo. I use Mikrotik for my switches. They were the first I found that had 10Gb uplinks, inexpensively and with low power usage. L2 configuration is janky (like every other switch) but workable. I use both SwOS and ROS, but moving towards ROS for dot1x (unfortunately inescapable to have that functionality on the switch).
But the actual router? That lives on NixOS in a virtual machine on a generic amd64 machine that also runs NixOS. I'd rather design / perfect my config once in terms of iproute2/nftables and know I can swap in any hardware. I've got a full policy routing setup that let's me define for each device what Internet horizon it can see (along with what other local devices it can access).
I also find the sibling comment mentioning routing speed to be funny. I've found that unencrypted gigabit WAN is easily handled by most amd64 computers. 10Gb LAN->LAN hairpin routing seems fine. But the big thing is doing gigabit OpenVPN/wireguard, which off the shelf hardware-accelerated routers just don't really do unless you spend a lot. (coupled with the above policy routing, I can configure things like this particular web browsing VM goes out a data center IP that rotates every day).
Wireless APs are similarly handled by hostapd on NixOS, driving (mostly) Mikrotik MiniPCIe Wifi cards. I don't really need the latest and greatest wifi gen, rather I just need them to work and be as maintenance-free as possible.
>Why use someone else's non FOSS, locked down linux, when you could
All my life I have had to make do with junk I could get at Walmart or Best Buy. Got tired of it. Cheap plastic shit that would inevitably shit the bed just a month or two after the warranty expired. I'm not making the IT helpdesk wages I was making 30 years ago... fuck that. While I couldn't spend ten grand on home networking, I could finally spend a little something on hardware that's not total shit.
Got the CCR2004-16G-2S+. No stupid ONTs, either, just the SFP+ modules. Plenty of backup 1gig ports if I get a third WAN (thinking about getting Starlink on standby). Actual proper fucking APs that do seamless handoff (hell, one of them probably covers the footprint of my house, if I'm honest). And no more shitty GUI configuration pages. I just shell in and band out commands on the command line (at least three times til I get the syntax right, but who gives a fuck).
Wish they made something with 3 or 4 SFP+ ports that I didn't need a rack for.
I gave it a shot but I really didn't see any benefit over OpenWRT which is plain old Linux.
There's also some really good value hardware that you can install OpenWRT on, I picked up a Xiaomi AP for like $30, flashed OpenWRT and it works great.
mikrotik is great for the tech enthusiast who wants to test things out or use enterprise grade hardware but without the enterprise grade cost (no license fees) but this also means you're missing the enterprise grade support. The equipment is a fantastic deal for what you get but you need to know what you're doing to get the best performance out of it.
I love Mikrotik products but they are lacking what I need at home.
I need basic IPS/IDS, notification when something is wrong without writing mikrotik scripts, easy backup failover, etc not VxLAN, QinQ and BGP extensive filtering :)
I moved to Unifi Cloud Gateways as home/small soho routers and can't be happier.
But Mikrotik stays as emergency hardware backup ..
How is the ipv6 situation these days? I left Ubiquiti 2 years ago because I needed to be able to configure the /56 I got from my isp. The unifi controller was pathetic in what it could do.
I'm new to Ubiquiti routers, but I had no problem dividing the /60 I got from my ISP and assign /64s to VLANs.
You might be interested in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZpJvpm1Ris (title: Does UniFi FINALLY support IPv6 Properly? State of IPv6 with Unifi Network v9). The video is about a year old, but from the looks it's not terribly outdated.
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.
I can't speak for the more "entreprise-y" unifi stuff but the routing on the ubiquiti gear i've used is actually just FRR and if you SSH in you can do a whole lot more than is surfaced through the UI - for example, I have VXLAN running on my UDR7 right now.
It's not something I've tried but I imagine you could actually expose FRR directly and configure through that
For a long time if you made any changes through the web UI it would overwrite the config. Then you could make changes and it would save. Then they removed it. Then they added it back but it didn't always work. Not sure the current state.
I have like a ~15y history of working with their stuff.
I am glad, I am 99% sure it's the case, that I don't have to do CGNAT with ATT. Sounds like a pain.
I like ipv6 but I have been thinking of disabling it lately because i cannot technically setup static leases with ipv6 like i can with ipv4, so technically the ipv6 for one of the services in my homelab could change and cause problems.
Android (phones, tv boxes) doesn't respect DHCPv6 IA_NA, but it should respect DHCPv6 IA_PD. Unless you have some other system that doesn't respect DHCP? Linuxes, Windowses, Playstation 5's support DHCPv6 IA_NA without problems.
But also, even if a device doens't support DHCPv6 IA_NA, you can always also have a DNS server in your network, and you can bind SLAAC-generated Android addresses to simple subdomains. This seems better than DHCP anyway.
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!
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.
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.
I was thinking the same thing. I switched from Mikrotik to OWRT because I wanted actual Linux, not a nerfed version of it that made scripting miserable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CRS are L3 switches; they are supposed to route and run dynamic routing protocols and do ECMP and all the good stuff so long as you dont configure features like nat and firewall that require the cpu and cant be offloaded.
The one thing that it frustratingly does not support that I wish it did is stateless bgp with ipv4 prefixes. It cant offload an ipv4 packet with an ipv6 next hop.
Each of the mikrotik switches even comes with a block diagram linked on its product page, showing for instance a single 1.3 Gbps between its L2 switch chip and its CPU.
>I really would question any "professional" network engineer that can't tell the difference between a switch and a router...
Oh the stories I could tell you.
I once had to work with a guy who didnt believe in dynamic routing.
Which wouldn't have been too bad but he also didnt believe in route summarisation or any kind of planning. So the network was carved up into random unpredictable blocks.
He sadly did very much believe in Mikrotik scripting, and so had scripts setup to disable/enable static routes based on very broad (often external) reachability criteria.
Whenever googles DNS had an issue the whole network would start flapping scripts like nobodies business.
The network was a large wisp with more than 600 pops and more than 10000 customers on its various services.
That engineer had been gainfully employed by multiple ISPs over 20 years.
I've had supposedly credible professional network engineers send me their PRIVATE ssh keys for access to something more than once. As a response to "please send me your ssh key for access to $THING"
In Poland, Play.pl sets up IPv6 by default. One phone call to ISP to disable the hidden firewall on their router gives us full IPv6 network transparency, no NATs are needed anymore. I highly recommend after installing a firewall appliance (for example OPNsense, but probably Mikrotik should have it as well). IPv6 "feels" like how networks should work since the beginning. IPv4 feels like a legacy technology.
They of course also have a DS-Lite AFTR gateways to tunnel the IPv4 traffic. In practice, everything works (for me at least).
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.
Yeah all fair. I actually got a Dec740 second-hand (I think it belonged to a small company that either folded or grew out of it) for a reasonable price, upped the SSD and the RAM, and now I'm building a router "platform" on top of Incus.
The idea is to run OpenWRT passing through the ISP NIC and one (or both) of the SFP+ ones going to the switch, and also run other services in isolated containers.
I'm even thinking about putting Home Assistant on a VM on it but I'm not sure yet what impact it will have on routing performance so that's on hold for now.
It's so much more powerful than what I need for the router/firewall that it should be comfortable to run quite a few things on it, and I can start moving them off it to other devices if Internet speeds catch up to it in the future.
MikroTik is a nightmare from what I have heard, companies who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars cannot wait for the contract to expire to replace everything.
For homelab, you are far better served buying a second hand Sophos baremetal/server rack mounted, and installing OPNSense in it.
I have a 2nd hand Sophos SG210 Rev3 from eBay, replaced the Celeron CPU with an i7 one, 16GB, new SSD, dual 10G NIC, it had been running like a dream.
Another option is to just buy some used enterprise mini PC (google project tinyminimicro) with PCIE slot, and use that. Probably lower power consumption than a full rack mounted server, definitely takes much less space (unless you already have the rack).
