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

Tue Nov 22 20:31:26 UTC 2011

We use a lot of Mikrotik in our network.  They are fantastic little routers 
as long as you remember that they are not Cisco/Juniper/whatever.  In other 
words, you pay a few hundred bucks, you get something worth at least that 
much.  But don't put it head to head against a $10k router.

Support is technically sound, but you have to email Latvia and then wait for 
the time difference to get a response.  If you expect to pay $100 for a 
router and then get prompt, courteous, 24/7 tech support, you will be 
disappointed. :)

We use their routers mostly for end user gateways doing QOS.  They do a 
superb job of this.  I wouldn't particularly want them as network edge 
devices or core routers; they will choke up if the PPS rate gets too high 
and you are doing any kind of packet mangling.

There have been a lot of bugs in various versions of RouterOS, but the 
current (5.8?) OS seems pretty good.  They added IPv6 support and fixed a 
ton of bugs.

OSPF implementation was buggy before OS5, but seems to be relatively stable 
since we upgraded.  BGP works fine but is perhaps less feature rich than 
Cisco/Zebra.

Joseph

Alyrica Networks Inc / www.alyrica.net

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs at seastrom.com>
To: "Leigh Porter" <leigh.porter at ukbroadband.com>
Cc: "nanog list" <nanog at nanog.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: Any recommended router. They are reliable and have good 
support.

>
> 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 