I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I was wondering if someone had any recommendations for a consultant or if someone has enough experience with the Dude to offer some support.

We are now on the 3rd or 4th major crash and are about done. We have had to rebuild almost our entire network a few times and the latest RouterOS broke our Dude yet again.

Looking for options before we just toss it all and move to something else. I know it's free, but right now it's costing more than other software we pay for. Support has pointed us to resources, but we are not having any luck and don't have enough experience or time to figure it out.

If anyone can offer their services or point us in the right direction to get us going, that would be great.

Arthur

Open a ticket with support@mikrotik.com about the issue. Ideally also supply us with supout file from host on which The Dude server is running.

I did that and I was provided some steps to take. They did not seem to work and as I stated in this post, this is the 3rd or 4th time this has happened, so I really am at the end of my rope. I'm saying that the steps were wrong or the software doesn't work, it's just not working for us.

I don't feel that have the experience to work through this and feel it would be more efficient to have someone with the knowledge to fix it if it is even fixable. Even our 2nd oldest copy of the database was not able to be loaded after multiple attempts and multiple software updates. I could fight with it for days or weeks or someone with the experience could do it in an hour. I think the second option is a better move for our small operation.

Anyone can rebuild an engine or do heart surgery from a book, but some times it is better to have the experience. For us, I feel this is one of those times.

No one looking for some work out there? Can anyone recommend someone they have worked with that may be looking?
Or, if none of that is possible, maybe someone has moved to another platform they can recommend. If we have to rebuild it from scratch, we might as well look at options.

What have crashed? Did you loose the dude database? Do you do backups? What device and ros version do you use?

I still keep my productive dude at 4b3 version trying time to time some rc or stable versions if they look promising. Having no important problems for years, just need to reboot the server time to time....

Yes version 4b3 is working ok with less features, im using now 6.36.3 because ROS radius user is a good feature, although blacklist isnt working for discovery devices. i'd recommend those versions so far.

Jarda, Percanta,

Thank you for the replies. It gives me hope.

We had been running the dude on our CCR1016-12G. That is where it had crashed a few times over the past few years. A few times we were able to restore backups of some state, but never from the data we had most up to date. Each time we lost more than 6 months of updates to the inventory.

We do most everything through Winbox. If it does not get backed up with backups there, we don't have much current. I did a back up not too long before it last crashed with an update to the RouterOS which we are currently running at 6.37.2

I also loaded a virtual CHR to host the Dude, so we do have options but need the skills to get it back up and running.

When I say "crashed", we are no longer able to connect with the client. We have sent the database to Mikrotik and they suggested fixes, but nothing has worked for us. It is like the database is corrupt.

If anyone is willing to work on this for us, we would gladly pay for your time to give us a quote and recommend how we can keep it stable.

Arthur

I suggest you make direct contact with these Consultants listed here. Their emails are there on the webpage. http://www.mikrotik.com/thedude
You might just get help from one of them before you speak to 3 or 4 persons.

Old version has backup button you can easily press and save one file that can be easily imported in new versions whenever you need. To backup new versions you need to stop the dude service and just copy out the dude storage content over the ftp. Putting back is the same.

hi, im running old version 3.6 in virtual mikrotik x86 with more than 800 routers and it works fine. New versions not stable and have more bugs. To Bossman you can contact me at ferkop1@gmail.com, we can make some deal.