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

Tue Nov 22 21:38:01 UTC 2011

I could look though our customer list and show over 2,000 networks being
ran by RouterOS from small networks running 20-50 meg all the way up to
networks running 10GigE BGP feeds.   We just turned up a location
running 4 BGP GigE feeds in a single router.  

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dennis Burgess, Mikrotik Certified Trainer 
Link Technologies, Inc -- Mikrotik & WISP Support Services
Office: 314-735-0270 Website: http://www.linktechs.net
LIVE On-Line Mikrotik Training - Author of "Learn RouterOS"

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Sullivan [mailto:joseph.sullivan at alyrica.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 22, 2011 2:31 PM
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Any recommended router. They are reliable and have good
> support.
> 
> 
> 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
> 