Live router…so I wanted to post before testing.
It’s doing VLAN, DHCP, and NAT Mangle (for DSCP) with simple queues based on the mangle.
Can I disable connection racking?
You can’t disable it, if using NAT. Why would you want to do that?
Connection tracking is essential to NAT. If you send a request to some site, how would then the router know where to send it’s reply, if there is no tracking?
I should not have said I am using NAT
I am using the IP Firewall → Mangle
I disabled connection tracking as a test…seems to be still looking at packets appropriately and working fine.
Some info:
http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/3.0/qos/flow.php → Connection Tracking
IMHO, no reason to disable it.
Routerboard throughput comparison
Both rb133 & rb532 show 55-70% increase in speed. The rb4xx, rb600 & rb1000 routerboards should have enough CPU to keep connection tracking enabled while also maxing out 100mbit Fast Ethernet ports.
But keep it enabled if you are using Queues, Equal cost multipath routing or anything else that requires Connection Tracking to work.
I replaced a rb150 router with a rb450 router recently because I needed more speed & throughput but couldn’t disable connection tracking due to the requirement of multipath routing & queues.