Comcast Bussiness Class and GRE Tunnels

Wed Jul 27 18:41:10 UTC 2011

We're evaluating a good spread of Mikrotik products as well, both for 
wireless AP's and general routers.

Almost worked out all the features(some features have names that 
conflict with other vendors, or operate unlike you expect them to), but 
for the price, even of their higher end ones (RB1100, online for $399) 
it has 13 Ge ports, and appears to be able to route traffic at faster 
speeds than I can get a competitor (cisco/juniper) box for.  We used the 
built-in speed test (iperf) and got 970mbit (and about 70% cpu usage) 
between 2 RB1100's (connected by a single routed gigabit connection) and 
about 1.4gbit to a local address on the box, which isn't probably a fair 
throughput test, but is a good test of where the cpu maxes out, since 
there doesn't appear to be any asic level forwarding unless you are 
switching layer 2 traffic.

For the price, I'm impressed, also the operating temperature range being 
so wide lets us put them in places we couldn't (supportably) put a cisco 
or juniper low-end (or high end) box, since we have some remotes where 
we need to go down to -10C or so.

Walter Keen
Network Engineer
Rainier Connect

(P) 360-832-4024
(C) 253-302-0194

On 07/27/2011 08:15 AM, David E. Smith wrote:
>> WT*F*?  I've never understood the appeal of Microtik, and now I understand
>> it even less.
>>
>>
> The software is... quirky, at times, but some of their hardware, especially
> on the very low-end, is hard to beat.
>
> For instance, they make a SOHO router with five Gigabit Ethernet ports for
> $70, which has point-and-click access to MPLS, DHCP (server and client), a
> few different flavors of VPN including IPSec, and a bunch of other stuff. It
> even supports BGP, though you're not going to do very much with that
> system's 32MB RAM.
>
> If you really wanted, you could buy the hardware then re-flash it with
> something else; the CPU on this particular system is a MIPS 24K, and there's
> probably other embedded Linux/*BSD distributions that would work well
> enough.
>
> David Smith
> MVN.net