I have bought and have in my possession / or donated the following MT devices :
2 cap ac (active)
1 wap ac (QCA) (active)
1 wap ac (ipq) (active)
1 hex s (drawer)
1 hap ac2 (drawer)
1 wsap ac lite (6.49)
1 RB750gr2 (donated)
I used to be a MT fanboy but came to realize you don’t learn anything here other than dealing with the idiosyncrasies of routerOS. With the exception of the wsap ac lite everything else runs/has OpenWRT 23.05.3.
Yes ipq40* was vlan quirky on OWRT until 23.05, migrating off of 6.49 to OWRT before was kinda ‘no’ if you have multiple ssid.
But the whole memory fallout on the wifi5 devices OWRT handles granularly with its packagemanager. My QCA is the most RAM challenged of my fleet, 55MB out of its 64 is in use (I run EAP which requires some additional packages & ram). But its my garden AP, its fine.
I slightly miss capsman6.49, it took some time and tedious handtuning 4 AP with channel/power/SSID/vlanDSA.
But I feel I now get my money’s worth on the “old” ac platform. That feeling MT can’t convey. You feel cheated. God I wasted so many weekends of my shortening life and my poor wife’s experimenting with v7.
MT is a badly run company. They made weird choices in terms of SoC’s, shortsighted in terms of memory even for current devices and they can’t execute: it took them way too long to release v7 and when it did was half baked.
Their biggest mistake is looking at RouterOS like its their diamond, but fail to realise it is a piece of bluestone broken off their headstone.
Oh and another funny one is some of their devices have PoE out that doesn’t work as PoE-in on one of their own. MT had me learn the concept of PoE Splitters, different from Injectors. I remember my surprise when I jacked in but no LEDs ignited. Yeaaaaaaaah : you had me .
But I’m still in love with the cap AC’s design, the most sensual, feminine piece of hardware ever designed. I often caressed its round shell when re-netinstalling images.
Credit to the designer. May be they should’ve put him in charge.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re trying to convey to us. “Goodbye MT” sounds like saying goodbye to MikroTik altogether, including their devices. But apparently, all the mentioned devices are still running on OpenWRT. So, in terms of hardware, MikroTik seems to be doing it right - even though it’s described as a “badly run company.”
“But I feel I now get my money’s worth on the “old” ac platform.”
Since ROS 7.13, you also get the AC-wave2 performance that the hardware is capable of - there’s no need to flash OpenWRT anymore. On the contrary, I’ve been using OpenWRT privately for over 10 years, and although ROS has its quirks, I’ve left OpenWRT behind and don’t miss it (especially LuCI and the half-baked uci CLI) at all. Yes, I miss bash scripting. ROS scripting “language” is too crippled and awkward. But for basic scripting it does the job.
And yes, CAP AC has a nice design and a small diameter/formfactor. That’s why I consciously bought a CAP AC only this year, when ROS 7.13 was released, and knowingly chose to forgo 802.11ax. I don’t regret it for a second. Best 802.11ac-wave2 AP (for buck) on the market in my opinion.
“Their biggest mistake is looking at RouterOS like its their diamond, but fail to realise it is a piece of bluestone broken off their headstone.”
I appreciate your sense of humor.
But I’m still in love with the cap AC’s design, the most sensual, feminine piece of hardware ever designed
Other than the owrt “one” experiment, owrt has no hardware of its own. I invested decent money in MT, had it not been for owrt I would’ve cut my loss and gone Omada. Its owrt’s credit that I still have MT hardware, not MT’s. But nicely inverted, Cicero.
As to scripting, owrt supports lua that I put to good use in a “Mullvad wireguard VPN exit randomizer”. One day I’m a Dane, the next I’m a Romanian. But I’m never a Brit (5 eyes). UCI commands only needed for updating the wireguard section.
Lua rocks.
Did you notice that people use “capsman 2” now to refer to capsman wifiwave2, assuming that the 6.49 capsman is 1 whereas capsman wifiwave2 should actually be capsman 3 and v6.49 be capsman2? Oh and you can run capsman2 on the same hardware you run capsman wifiwave2 on. Throw in the different soc’s and witness the scenarios where some capsmen can’t manage their local wifi. Rofl.
As to my cap AC infatuation, you missed the point where I repeatedly had to grab her slippery body whilst pressing her reset button and plug in a live ethernet jack. And hold out for more than 20 seconds.
OK, you got rid of ROS. The operating system by MT. But keep the Routerboard hardware. So, not a real farewell. It is okay. Hardware is decent and as long you are happily running it OpenWRT. Why not.
Regarding your CAPsMAN theories. Can’t remember ever reading “Capsman 2”.
I call it “wireless capsman” and “wifi capsman”. That’s what it actually is. The one that controls devices with (legacy) “wireless” drivers and the one for the devices with (manufacturer) “wifi” drivers (wifi-qcom/wifi-qcom-ac). I don’t care for whatever v1/v2/v3 of capsman of year 2007 and 2009. I am not using ROS for so long that I could have an “image” of that in my mind.
I invested decent money in MT
You don’t need to use the hardware if you are unhappy. Write off the investment. After all these years, your hardware is hardly worth anything anymore, except for the sentimental memories of pressing your cap AC reset button. Go TPLINK Omada Cloud - anav would recommend that to you anyway.
Imagine somebody new reading that line and wonder why they get confused? Esp. when new devices are still shipped with ROS v6. Wi-Fi and Wireless in the UK mean the same thing.
I’ve been onboard through the transition and I’m still confused by the multitude of variants and twists & turns. I tend to refer to it as legacy CAPsMAN and new CAPsMAN.
It took me a lot of reading and experimentation to realise that trying to use new CAPsMAN with legacy AC devices is just not worth the trouble if you want something as simple as a guest VLAN. You have to do far too much manual configuration. That must be a software problem - I assume in the Linux kernel drivers? I don’t know enough about the Linux ecosystem but I thought that the source code was available so surely Mikrotik could branch it?
The later is a bit of an aside but is another reason why “Goodbye MT” is something I’m considering too.
