MikroTik and Ampere co-developing a product line with server-class CPUs | Hacker News Reader

MikroTik and Ampere co-developing a product line with server-class CPUs

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47 pointsInitEnabler14 comments

I have been using Mikrotik gear for >10 years, and have been impressed ever since, the ROI is incredible and there are so many features I wish were available on other platforms.

+1 Just found out about them 4 years ago, they are awesome.

It's kind of funny - a fair amount of the major network vendors' hardware (i.e. Cisco, Arista, Juniper, HPE) isn't that much better than what MikroTik has produced at a fraction of the cost. Having a better and faster processor is great, but I don't think it's going to move the needle very much.

This really highlights how much the OS on network hardware is actually the biggest barrier to entry to the larger market. It's arguably one of the market segments where open source has traditionally had the least amount of adoption. Things have certainly been changing in recent years certain use-cases (e.g. SONiC and similar for DC switching) but it remains true that the OS itself (and the associated supporting infrastructure) is actually what drives both adoption and stickiness, not the newest/biggest/fastest speeds and feeds.

It's been true for a while that if RouterOS could be enhanced and made more attractive (manageability, support, QA, feature roadmap, 3rd part ecosystem, etc) it would make MikroTik a major market disruptor.

MikroTik has been a bit of a behind the scenes player in networking since the beginning - at least in western markets. Even though I don't work in the networking field as much anymore I always look at their product release newsletters and am surprised at the price to performance their equipment provides with new interesting features.

I'm really not sure what a "Cloud-Native" processor is - will be interesting to see what comes of this partnership though!

They do have excellent bang for your buck. I haven't used one of their products for 7/8 years but the UI and defaults were less inspiring. I found that engineers found it easy to make catastrophic mistakes. I think opening up a service by default enabled that service on all interfaces, and that you then had to add a rule to keep it off all ports. This lead to things you would normally like on your LAN ending up on the WAN. Excellent reliable kit once you learnt its foibles though.

Yeah that's a really good way to put it. I love their kit, there's so much functionality available at a very reasonable price point. One of my favourite things about them is that it's pretty straightforward to move off the beaten path. As an example, I have routinely used their little wireless routers as a wireless client instead of as an access point. One of the places where I regularly do field operations requires us to have 5 or 6 machines connected together with wired Ethernet but only has wifi available for an Internet connection. I use one of the Mikrotik wAP ac units to connect to the on-prem wifi and act as a DHCP server + gateway for the wired network. It took a couple of minutes to figure out how exactly to reconfigure it to do that but it's been absolutely bulletproof since then.

That being said, I've also locked myself out of them a fair bit because their configuration tool will certainly let you configure the device in a way that will not work at all and will prevent you from accessing the web interface to fix it.

> I've also locked myself out of them a fair bit

There's a solution for that: Winbox (the native app, nowadays also for Linux and Mac) and the Safe mode feature.

With Safe mode enabled, once the device detects that the connection to Winbox has been lost, it rolls back the configuration back to state, when it was working.

RoMON is a life saver to be able to unbrick a device (remotely if you have another working mikortik device on the same network to proxy through!) if you mess up some config that breaks the normal tcp/ip remote management

> RoMON works by establishing independent MAC layer peer discovery and data forwarding network. RoMON packets are encapsulated with EtherType 0x88bf and dst-MAC 01:80:c2:00:88:bf and its network operates independently from L2 or L3 forwarding configuration.

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/Manual:Tools/RoMON

I have deployed close to 30 mikrotiks mostly outdoors and the hardware is robust. The software, like a lot of software, was a moving target. Features like some site to site VPN would stop working after upgrading routerOS, but once it was working and don’t change anything it was good to go.

Mikrotik loves to use CPUs to do an ASIC's job.

With the benefit of flexibility - a decade later your router will continue to get updates adding new features and protocols

Has Ampere released any new cpus lately? Love the idea of ARM in the datacenter, but seems like the single thread performance has fallen behind desktop processors like the M3.

Yes, they released Ampere One recently but it's pretty disappointing.

They don’t want to be dependent on Annapurna. Smart move.

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