It seems to be a common theme that when you are having a problem with RouterOS the recommended fix is to “netinstall” it.
The symptoms I have heard of where a netinstall has fixed the issue are:
- Router randomly crashing
- supout.rif’s never completing
- Passwords resetting themselves
- Ethernet ports flapping or having large error counts/connectivity issues
- Router will not upgrade, it gets stuck on a particular version.
- Configuration changes from Winbox/CLI not taking effect (changes to routing filters/firewall and the like)
I have also noticed that these sort of problems will start after upgrading routers.
To me this sounds like file system corruption, or more likely differing versions of critical files conflicting with each other.
I understand that a lot of RouterBoard’s do not have much RAM and need to run a filesystem, but now on the high RAM systems like x86 and CCR Mikrotik could use a compressed root loaded in to memory. With a compressed root, on boot the RouterBoard bootloader would load the compressed root image in to RAM and run from it. Configuration is still stored to a filesystem on the NAND.
This would give the following advantages:
- Minimizes wear on NAND (even further)
- Removes chance of OS corruption as OS files are not overwritten
- Makes it easy to have multiple firmware versions on the same router and boot between them (just change the pointer to which compressed root image is loaded)
- Makes firmware upgrades easier, just add the new compressed root image and set the boot loader to use it on next boot
This is what Cisco and Fortigate do and it works well.
Anyway this is just a suggestion, not a criticism, maybe this is not a problem, but then maybe this post could start an idea in someone at Mikrotik.