Any recommended router. They are reliable and have good support.

Tue Nov 22 19:52:05 UTC 2011

Leigh Porter <leigh.porter at 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