I would really like a way to use the “/tool fetch” command in scripts that will work directly in RAM and not write to flash. Many of the new Mikrotik routers have decent amounts of RAM, but low amounts of flash that I don’t want to wear out.
I have a couple ideas on ways to solve this.
Rather than fetch, a separate tool that will output the results of an HTTP GET/POST so it can be stored in a variable. It would be nice if the HTTP response code is included somehow. Bonus points for somehow storing arrays / command outputs as JSON!
Alternatively, RouterOS can include a RAM Disk feature so we can allocate a few MB of storage to store the responses in RAM. It has been requested a few times here, but nothing ever came of it. This would be close to the bare minimum for my needs, though I could probably figure something out if this is added.
One project I was hoping to start was to build a cnMaestro-like tool that allows routers to connect to a remote webserver to “check in”, push out stats (connected wifi clients, firmware versions, uptime, ect), grab configuration changes and act as a very basic internal DDNS. I’m afraid of wearing out the flash excessively by doing many HTTP requests every 5 minutes or so.