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Comment by cdancette | Hacker News Reader

I really like Mikrotik hardware (https://mikrotik.com/products) for home routers and wireless access points. Their products are not very expensive, the hardware is great, and the OS is highly configurable.

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I setup a couple of Mikrotik routers at my work and it's done wonders. The CCR (Cloud-Core Routers) are absolutely amazing, but probably overkill for most home users. But considering when I first started at my job the network was an absolute nightmare. Because they were using a NetGear Nighthawk AC1900 (N7000), for around 70-80 users at any given time across 3 separate buildings. Considering every desk has 2 or 3 connected devices (Computer, VoIP phone, and some people also have laptops as well, plus everyone wants to connect their cellphones to the wifi). Now they treat me like a god dam wizard in disguise. They went from massive internet congestion, slow speeds, and phone calls always dropping (VoIP), to smooth sailing. The previous IT guy still works there, but he's more of a media guy.

Now, for the most part I do general IT support and a ton of web development for company, without a ton of oversight.

I did the same when I joined my last job. They were running everything off two BT business hubs. I've put both of them into a brain-dead modem mode, with one as a failover WAN, bought a Mikrotik RB2011UIAS-RM (which has been wonderful, 100% uptime), replaced the 10/100 switches with gigabit equipment and installed a set of four Ubiquiti WiFi access points around the building.

We've got a nice guest wireless network for our clients with token based auth and a really reliable and consistent office network.

I recently bought a Mikrotik HAPlite for home which has also been great, I can VPN in and check my security cams without any horrifying cloud service getting a livestream of my home.

pcengines APU2 is also a pretty sweet platform: https://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

Also for homelabbers the https://www.supermicro.com/products/system/Mini-ITX/SYS-E300... is like the "ultra-NUC", really small but 2x10 gbe NICS built in, plus IPMI.

How loud is that little Supermicro, though?

Yeah definitely noisier. https://tinkertry.com/supermicro-superserver-sys-e200-8d-and... shows about 60db(!) with fans at full blast during spinup but 42db or so when dialled down. So not too bad.

The difference with IPMI tho is you can safely put them in the attic or wherever.

The Xeon D's are nice (8 physical / 16 logical cores for less than 45W for the D-1541) but I wouldn't recommend buying Supermicro's pre-assembled machines for home lab use; they are noisy. It would be better to buy their bare motherboards instead (e.g. http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/D/X10SDV...) and self-install it into a low-noise mini-ITX case instead.

How is Mikrotik's software? I find UBNT's to be excellent for someone who doesn't want to do everything via CLI.

Some things are better via the gui (web or a windows exe that's wineable), but I prefer ssh access.

I like the fact everything is included, ospf, bgp, pim, mpls/vpls, you name it it's there (aside from decent user management). I used to run bgp at home but moved to ospf recently

Yeah it's pretty impressive to have all of those protocols included in such "low cost" routers (less than a hundred dollars).

Why do you need bgp/ospf for your home network? Are you just experimenting?

I used to manage the network of my school campus, we connected about 1000 persons, and ospf was working great! We didn't use mikrotik though, we used extremenetworks routers

Multiple subnets to keep the wireless domain, wired domain, protected domains and dmz apart. I used to run the backbone over wireless when I rented (couldn't run cat5 through the walls), so didn't vlan everything back to a single router.

OSPF makes it far easier to manage those, but I did used to run BGP as it made more sense to me when I learned about routing protocols and was more forgiving of wireless issues (which could have been me using the wrong OSPF mode to be honest)

In addition to the normal fixed infrastructure, I have a cluster of 5 cheap mikrotiks that I use for a little experimentation with things like failover time, but that's mainly for work purposes.

Mikrotik does in fact support VLAN bridging over WiFi (only between Mikrotik devices), unless you're running in CAPsMAN mode.

When I switched to CAPsMAN, I ended up using VPLS for my wireless backbone, thus giving me proper layer 2 isolation, without fragmentation (MPLS not being limited by the L3 MTU).

One goal was to keep layer 2 multicast network off wireless where possible. Mikrotik's don't do IGMP snooping (until very recently). The wireless backbone had to support multi-networked traffic of course, but local traffic (between a couple of devices in one room) could be kept off the link

MikroTik Webfig (www GUI), winbox (Windows native eve), and SSH/Telnet CLI have parity feature sets.

The CLI is nice in ways Cisco IOS isn’t, like a safe mode, auto-complete and in-line tab suggestions.

As if the feature parity between UIs wasn’t huge, the feature-set itself is major. RouterOS runs on PCs, there is a VM version as well, but you can get a an performant SOHO Routerboard unit for stupid cheap and they even have the actual Routerboard hardware available in bare PCB form-factor for OEM integration.

Perhaps it's an acquired taste. Some of our older office/test network routing is Mikrotik hardware, but since I started pitching in, all the new stuff has been Ubiquiti. I think it's night and day, the UBNT stuff is great but I really dislike the Mikrotik UIs - I find it really confusing and in my experience the documentation is generally poor (unless you only use the CLI).

The Ubiquiti hardware generally seems much higher performance and is also low cost. But on the other hand, I do know some guys who really like the Mikrotik stuff so maybe it's just me...

It's a "pretty" UI around what is basically Linux. E.g. you won't get far without understanding Linux's iptables, but both MT's command line and GUI are a heck of a lot more discoverable and user-friendly than the iptables command line.

If you want to do anything more than very basic single AP home scenario, you have to be willing to get your hands dirty. BUT they are very configurable, make for great learning experiences, and (from my experience) are very reliable, both hardware and data-plane software.

That said, the configuration software DOES have bugs from time to time, but MT is decently responsive.

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