It's a shame that Mikrotik doesn't have a easy to use global GUI.
It's the right hardware, and great firmware and wonderful flexibility - but it needs an easy to use GUI controller to make the simple stuff easy to take over from Ubiquiti.
It's the right hardware, and great firmware and wonderful flexibility - but it needs an easy to use GUI controller to make the simple stuff easy to take over from Ubiquiti.
Even before now there are some limitations with UniFi that have annoyed me. Setting up more complex DNS and firewall rules requires editing the JSON config. IPv6 tunnelling isn’t well supported. The stats in the controller, whilst neat, aren’t very useful because they have to be manually reset to zero.
CLI for Port Forward: /ip firewall nat add chain=dstnat dst-port=1234 in-interface=ether1-gateway action=dst-nat protocol=tcp to-address=192.168.1.1 to-port=1234
VS having to document the same task in the GUI:
IP->Firewall->Nat-> Add New
General Tab Chain: dstnat Protocol: TPC Dst. Port: Port In. Interface: ether1-gateway
Action Tab Action: dst-nat To Address: IP address of Server To Port: Port # of Service
Highly worth getting one to try out.
With the CLI you either need to document it yourself, or you need to know to query if there are any port forwards. That can be a problem if there is more than one person responsible for the network, or if someone else needs to inherit your setup.
Documentation of configuration sometimes isn’t an issue on your own home system because you generally have a high level memory of what changes you made and their purpose. Conversely I still struggle sometimes with Ubuntu because I customise my configuration using command line tools, and I find keeping track of those changes or the implications of those changes is difficult.
This news (covering up, legal overriding good security practices) is super concerning though, and I'm definitely going to start looking around as well.
I would start with a hAP ac², a wireless router that is approximately the equivalent of their hEX Ethernet router plus a dual-band AP (cAP/wAP ac). It's a great standalone device and less than $70, or you could get the individual devices for a bit more flexibility.
Avoid the models labeled "lite", those are low-cost versions with lower routing speeds and 2.4GHz WLAN only.
For management you can obviously configure each device separately, or you can use CAPsMAN where one device acts as the controller and handles all configuration. It's not as slick as Ubiquiti, but it works.
I think it's specific to Access Points, so not a general purpose centralized controller for MikroTik equipment, but... centralizing access point management seems to be the main thing under discussion here.
No, you don't? I mean you can but you don't need to.
There are cases when that is useful, true - for example, the automatic channel selection makes some curious choices sometimes.