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Comment by brooksbp | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Mikrotik to anyone fed up with traditional consumer wifi routers/APs. I dont know how they compare to other vendor hw eg Asus + OpenWRT, but this little guy has been rock solid and a joy to use: http://routerboard.com/RB2011UAS-2HnD-IN

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Thanks for the recommendation. I'm absolutely fed up with my D-Link DIR-655 always needing to be restarted when the wireless decides to stop working, and was looking for something exactly like this. I was beginning to dread having to build something like a Smoothwall/pfSense box; I did that around 2005 with an old desktop computer and it didn't work that well.

I've actually heard of Mikrotik before; about 10 years ago I was doing some work planning a 2.4GHz wireless ISP (WISP) and I think Mikrotik equipment was highly regarded then (especially in the 900MHz spectrum IIRC) so looking forward to this.

Here's a link to a distributor where it can be purchased: http://www.roc-noc.com/mikrotik/routerboard/RB2011UAS-2HnD-I...

The smaller versions also work as well and are only $80! http://www.roc-noc.com/mikrotik/routerboard/RB951G-2HnD.html

I have a Mikrotik/RouterOS device.

Positives: Cheap. Powerful. Stable.

Negatives: Harder to use than OpenWRT/DD-WRT or similar. It is still a web-interface, but doesn't "baby" the user. If you aren't comfortable manually setting up interfaces and then setting up tunnels through those interfaces for example then skip this.

I love it. But I won't kid myself, it isn't for everyone. The documentation isn't comprehensive and the software is very powerful but not very intuitive (or at least it isn't if you don't have a good background configuring network equipment).

Anyone who has ever set up a Cisco router to do anything even slightly complex should be able to pick up Mikrotik in a snap. The windows based GUI configuration tool (winbox) is simply incredible. (Runs fine in wine on OSX as well)

they rewrote it into a browser based app, looks identically, just a bit more shiny.

I've got a pretty in-depth networking background and for my home network rebuild I wanted something less power-hungry than my previous big AMD box running Vyatta, but needed something that supported n+ layer 3 interfaces, BGP and VLANs (i.e a proper router). Couldn't justify the cost of a 1900 series Cisco and associated k9-sec license, so went for a RB1200 (512MB RAM, 1Ghz PPC chip, 10 physical ports, 5 of which can do hardware switching and wire-speed filtering) and a couple of Groove access points.

Getting tagged and untagged VLANs to interact together on a single port is a non-starter (not supported at all), and getting VLAN trunking and routing to work together simultaneously requires terminating the layer three interface on a virtual bridge, then for each VLAN you need to create a virtual VLAN interface for each physical interface, and then put that onto the bridge as a 'bridge port'. The documentation is very scant on this side of things and the command line interface is pretty arcane compared to IOS but does make sense after a while.

If they weren't 1/4 price (or less) than an equivalent product from $enterprise_vendor I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone, but seeing as they are - if you've got a networking background and can put up with some of it's quirks and limitations, there is very little out there that can compete with Mikrotik on price/feature set.

The Unifi line by Ubiquiti is also great, dirt cheap, good-looking and have wi-fi bridging as a bonus.

http://www.ubnt.com/unifi

Rather than the RB2011 series, if you can make do with fewer ports, you can look toward the RB751.

Fewer ports, but essentially the same wireless specs (1W DC 2.4GHzbgn). The routing capacities on both are way more than you'll ever run up against on a home connection. Same RouterOS. License level is one lower, but that essentially just restricts you to 200 VPN connections instead of 500.

The RB751 is ~$80 (5xgiga) or ~$60 (5xfast) versus the 2011's ~$130 (5xgiga+5xfast).

Seconded. I've got one for my office (20+ computers and a number of BYODs) and I've had to power it off once - when we were moving. It is solid, stable, has not crashed or frozen for me even once.

Setup can be quite complicated, though, compared to a consumer router.

Look well-made. I've never seen that brand in any US stores unfortunately. There were a few US distributors listed but most were tiny shops.

We've ordered thousands of dollars worth of stuff from roc-noc.com over a couple of years. Chatted on the phone with them a bit too. I'd definitely vouch for them if you're looking to make an order.

Seconding this recommendation. In addition to being super powerful they have great potential as a research platform.

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