Hacker News Reader

Comment by Roritharr | Hacker News Reader

I just bought this the other day to setup a VPN to guard the IPMI interface in a 2U server I could cheaply house in some otherwise unmanaged rackspace. It's a pretty nifty piece of kit, but I still have to get better at understanding RouterOS.

View on HN

I've been playing around with RouterOS, but it's not the easiest thing to get started with. There's plenty of documentation, but it often feels like they really want you to take the Mikrotik training, rather than you figuring it out for yourself. It's really interesting hardware though.

I love RouterOS and have been using it extensively for home and soho. And I absolutely agree: it can bee a pain to set it up. Every little part of it is complicated enough to spend hours on. Setting up networks can take long long hours. But documentation has improved lately and you can also watch their own YouTube channel, which has some useful videos. Also you should try using their forum, which is full of helpful guys. Don´t let yourself get scared, if someone gets very rough with you, though! On the other hand you can tune it in endless ways.

RouterOS really isn't any more difficult to learn than competing NOS like JunOS or IOS-XR, both of which also suffer from much in the way of easy-to-use Getting Started kind of docs for newcomers to high-end networking gear. Having used Juniper gear in my homelab for multiple years before I ever bought a Mikrotik switch our router, the hardest part was figuring out where everything was compared to JunOS.

I'm interested to see how many people saying that RouterOS is difficult to pick up are completely new to managed networking equipment, compared to how many are moving from competing solutions.

Had a router by them for a long time. It was fantastic but it took me months to set it up in a way that I'd be confident to put it to live service. It was a nice hobby project, and it paid off.

Now I had replaced it with a FritzBox as it's popular here in Germany, and my SO may be able to do something with it when I'm not there. As a new hobby project, I have a RB5009UG+S+IN lying around...waiting for me to get into the flow again...maybe around Christmas...

Does it support DPDK for fast packet processing or maybe SR-IOV ?. Given the price tag, I suppose it doesn't, but the documentation is sparse.

I dont think you can install your own OS on this, yet? :) , in order to do 25GBPS on ARM, I am sure they are doing some sort of DPDK ( I mean user space networking.). I would love to learn more on how do they achieve 25GBPS on this little arm64.

Almost guarantee that they aren't doing 25GBPS on the arm chip but on the dedicated ASIC.

I know for most of the Mikrotik platforms what gets offloaded to the ASIC and what gets handled by the CPU is a big deal in performance tuning and selecting the correct product for your use case.

I also think they only achieve about 15GBPS on their backplanes of their routers with SFP28, enough to show a benefit over SFP+ but not really full speed.

Lack of SR-IOV is mentioned in the article.

I think the crucial flaw here for the IPMI/BMC access use case is the fact that the card requires the server to be powered on to function. So if you accidentally turn the server off it’s game over for remote access.

Yes, but not a very deep problem in my case since I can order Remote Hands for this very niche scenario. A reboot doesn't let it loose power and that's all this is going to see for the forseeable future.

Most servers can be configured to always power on after a power failure.

Then all you need is a remotely-operated power outlet, which is pretty standard for colos nowadays. Toggling the power outlet is as good as a human driving out there and poking the stupid ACPI power-on button.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com