The problem is that on RouterOS 7, there is a fatal data leakage issue. The symptom is that the available space of your RouterOS will become less and less, to the point where it may reach 0. If you restart RouterOS at this point, your RouterOS will be dead, and you can only solve this problem using Netinstall.
This problem is not as obvious in other RouterOS models, but it has become a serious issue for the hAP ac2, a device with only 16M memory. After installing the completely new 7.7 system, there is only 1-2MB of available space left.
It all started when the official website began recommending version 6.x, and in the upgrade process, people began upgrading their hAP ac2 to the latest 7.x version. Every time the official website released a new 7.x version upgrade, for some unknown reason, some hAP ac2 units failed to upgrade and could not be turned on. Over time, the available space of the hAP ac2 gradually decreased until it reached 0KB. If the hAP ac2 experiences a power outage or other problems at this point, it becomes a brick that can only be repaired through Netinstall. Even worse, there may be situations where the hAP ac2 cannot be fixed by Netinstall, which started occurring after version 7.6.
Did this problem only occur to me? If anyone else has encountered this issue, please share how you solved it.
I don’t see such behaviour, but definitely 7.x takes up more space:
What puzzles me, is why there is a difference, between 2 identical systems (hAP ac2), with identical configuration.
It has been always so, even when I ran 6.x
Out of space problem is probably from left overs from old configuration, logs, graphing, possible file system corruption. Export full configuration (not backup), net-install and restore exported configuration should correct the issue.
Differences between free space on identical configured routers can be due to logging, graphing, possible left overs from file system issues or upgrades.
Most of these issues I have seen from routers that have been upgraded from ROS 6 to 7, and have not been net-installed to completely refresh the file system and restore the config export (not from a backup). On routers with small storage I also never keep any extra files on them, always remove any backups/exports for safe storage.
I agree with your statement, so in the past, I also performed netinstall on the problematic devices, but found that the issue still persisted. To be honest, I’m not sure which configuration caused this problem.
The official ticket has identified the problem and confirmed that there is a leak, but there is currently no specific timeline for the fix. They also did not inform me which of my settings caused the leak. It seems that I’m the only one who has experienced this issue.
By “experienced”, I mean on a fresh netinstall of RouterOS 7 on hAP ac2.
The hAP ac2 device has a small 16MB HDD, which is too small to use RouterOS 7.x.
Using the same code on RouterOS 6.x on the same device does not result in any leakage issues, indicating that RouterOS 7.x still has a long way to go.
I believe that MikroTik should issue a statement similar to the one previously issued for CRS3xx devices until the leakage issue is resolved.
RouterOS 7.x is not recommended on the hAP ac2 device.
I do not observe any “leakage”. I can confirm that the remaining space is too small for comfort, and that it was a bad idea for MikroTik to use 16MB flash on such devices with RouterOS v7 ahead and being monolithic (in RouterOS v6 you could omit packages you did not use, but in v7 all is in a single package).
However I have a space of 1340kB at this time with RouterOS v7.8rc2 and I monitor it every time when I upgrade. I observe that right after upgrade the space is usually a little more (like 1400kB) and a day later it is back to the 1300-1350kB range.
I see no leak. There might be usage scenarios that require more storage than others (having a lot of DHCP leases, having many graphed items, etc) and run into problems, but without seeing a config export it is impossible to tell what it may be.
I recommend to do a /export show-sensitive in a terminal window, cut and paste that to a file on an external computer, then netinstall the thing to a recent version with no default config, connect via MAC address and paste the saved export file.
Best is to omit non-critical configuration at that time, i.e. only add the basic config you need and see how it behaves, add the rest later.
(especially things that you might expect to take storage space)
