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Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by stingraycharles on Monday March 28, 2022 @02:09PM (#30833618)
As someone who’s a home networking enthusiast, and has too much Mikrotik gear at home, I can kind of understand what they’re coming from. RouterOS has the usability of “enterprise-grade” network equipment (meaning it’s arcane and non-intuitive), but at the same time has lots and lots of half-working features.

I simply cannot believe how terrible their IPv6 support is (still no connection tracking!), and plenty of weird glitches, etc.

But! Their hardware is very reasonably priced, and an excellent gateway to “real” networking equipment for the hobbyist. It’s unfair to compare it against Juniper and the likes: yes, it’s much better, but yes, the products are also 10x - 100x as expensive.

While everything that’s done in RouterOS can also be done under vanilla Linux, I buy Mikrotik precisely because I don’t want to build a custom Linux router. I want something that comes with a GUI, and I won’t have to spend too much time setting up.

Having said that, I would absolutely kill for an “escape” Linux shell. I know that RED supports ECN in Linux, please allow me to use it!

Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by sleepydog on Monday March 28, 2022 @05:41PM (#30835960)
> still no connection tracking!

Seriously? Is it not possible to have stateful firewall rules for IPv6 traffic? Or is it just NAT that won't work (I don't care about NAT, NAT can die)? I was considering getting a microtik router but this would be a dealbreaker.

Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by justsomehnguy on Tuesday March 29, 2022 @06:26AM (#30840820)
You can use CHR to test all features (at least non-hardware dependent): https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=...
Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by blibble on Monday March 28, 2022 @04:13PM (#30835019)
> I simply cannot believe how terrible their IPv6 support is (still no connection tracking!)

I see a list of connections under "IPv6 firewall" under the connections tab?

> and plenty of weird glitches

this bit however I agree with

Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by stingraycharles on Monday March 28, 2022 @04:42PM (#30835315)
I don’t think that contrack based mangle rules work, though. If it does, it must be a recent fix (I’m on ROS7.1)
Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by iso1210 on Monday March 28, 2022 @05:23PM (#30835776)
7.x is still effectively in beta, there are many features that don't work yet, last time I checked neither multicast nor bfd were working.
Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by Alupis on Monday March 28, 2022 @07:02PM (#30836671)
There is a chart with 7.x routing protocol statuses available here[1].

[1] https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/v7+Routing+Protoc...

Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by walrus01 on Monday March 28, 2022 @05:29PM (#30835840)
the idea that somebody thought to ship to production release a router operating system with broken bfd is amazing.
Re:A PCIe network interface card that adds full router capab... by Alupis on Monday March 28, 2022 @06:47PM (#30836525)
Well, they didn't - not really at least.

7.1 is only required on their brand new router targeted at enthusiast home users. The RB5009, which specifically says it's targeting home labs and explicitly came with the caveat of 7.1 being the minimum version and there is no LTS in the 7.x branch as-of yet. This is the only product that requires the 7.x branch.

Everything else ships with 6.48.x LTS or 6.49.x Stable. Nearly all serious users are using the LTS branch. The 7.x branch is well known within the RouterOS community to not be "production" ready... although that's where new features and stuff are going. It will be, one day.