An odd question to ask so i will explain my situation
We currently use RB922 RB’s setup with a 4G daughter board acting as a router to connect an RPI to the internet which is used to manage a sensor. Seems excessive as i know people will think why dont we use use a 4G modem on the RPI but we have our reasons, one of which is the RB922 powers the RPI via the USB port which allows me to switch on / off the RPI remotely via fixed IP sim cards.
So hopefully thats a bit of background. The RPI runs Linux as its OS, we then install a single library that manages the sensor which is connected to a single USB port on the RPI. The sensor collcts the data which is temporarily written to the SD card, as long as there is an internet connection the data is sent straight to our cloud servers in real time. The only time data is stored is if we loose the internet connection and even then we only store up to an hours worth of data..
My thought is as RB OS is a “version” of Linux could we install the same library and run the same commands on the RB which would mean i could loose the RPI and just have the RB922 doing all the work?
Kind of a throw it out there question really, i guess i could just try it but thought i woudl ask the community first.
RouterOS is based on the Linux kernel. And that’s just about it. Pretty much everything else around the kernel (shell, services, etc) are closed source and written by MikroTik.
So, no you cannot run your “library” on ROS.
Your only bet would be Metarouter https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Metarouter I don’t know if RB922 supports this feature.
There you can run something more linux-ey, but YMMV. Metarouter is a feature that’s pretty much abandoned for a long time now.
@jarda - OpenWRT wouldn’t really work for me as i woudl prefer to retain the original features, functions and more importantly support from Mikrotik.
@Cha0s - As expected to be honest. Metarouter looks interesting and probabully would have worked but as it seems to be no longer supported it wouldn’t really be something i would want to progress with.
I’m a keen advocate of retaining current versions and we tend to run pretty much as up to date a possible. V4 (beta) / V3 Production is a long way off the current V6.x so its not for me i’m afraid.
Appreciate the help gents, i think i have the answer i was expecting although not the one I wished for have a good weekend.
It’s not that bad with Metarouter, it still exists in current RouterOS, and there’s no official word about being abandonned in the near future. It’s just that:
a) It doesn’t seem to receive much (if any) new development
b) It’s unusable on a lot of new devices, because they have only tiny 16MB flash and it can barely hold RouterOS itself and nothing else (I don’t know if your RB922 has more)
I’m also not sure if it can access router’s USB port, and I’m affraid the answer might be “no” (but I’m not sure).
Looking at the RB922 spec it states it has a 128Mb of NAND Ram / Storage, is that the same as FLASH Ram ?? if so looks like it could support a VM instance via MetaRouter.
Re the USB port, looking at the WiKi there is no mention of USB ports so i guess the only way to find that out would be to install it and try.
Right, you have a chance with Metarouter. But the USB will likely be trouble, I only found few older topics, where it was said that it’s not supported. But feel free to try anyway.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of Metarouter. I very much like the idea of being able to add custom features, but this solution didn’t work well for me. First it was horribly unstable, and I mean absolutely unusuable for anything except experiments, to see if it does anything. I believe it was eventually fixed, but I gave up already at that point. Another problem was that whole VM was a little bit too heavy for the hardware (it would be less problem with newer and faster devices). And it doesn’t completely solve the problem anyway. It’s of course nice that I can save one hardware device, but it still leaves me with whole system to take care of, even if it’s only VM.
I would rather like to see support for custom packages. Have some official SDK, which would allow to compile most software that works with Linux. Have some interface to allow to integrate configuration of these packages in WinBox/WebFig/CLI. Even support for loadable kernel modules (drivers) would not be impossible, but that’s advanced stuff and possibly unnecessary, just adding support for few popular sensors and stuff could be enough. Imagine what could be done with this, sky would be the limit. Unfortunately, it’s not likely to happen.
have a good weekend.