Metarouter unreliable

RouterOS Virtualization
1

Hi,

I am using metarouter (with OpenWRT) on RB450G with 3.24 and metarouter (not OpenWRT!) seems to be pretty unreliable:

Very often, when rebooting/shutting down, the router just hangs with Status “rebooting” or “shutting-down”. There is no way no force a clean restart of a metarouter other than rebooting the whole RouterOS. This can’t be a good idea but it’s all that works for me.

Sometimes the metarouter would just crash, no ping possible and the console just prints nothing. I would not necessarily blame RouterOS for that but I blame RouterOS for the fact that I cannot restart the meta router other than forcing a reset of the entire host system!

Thanks!

2

What version of RouterOS you are using? 3.24 is version of bootloader, not RouterOS.

There have been some metarouter issues fixed in 6.38: *) metarouter - fixed startup process (introduced in 6.37.2);

3

According to “/system resource print” it is version: 6.38 (stable).

It’s really frustrating. Sometimes the meta router just crashes and the only way to get it back is to reboot the entire system.

4

The same happens for us, on the same platform (450G). We use metarouter quite extensively, but we found it to be unreliable and “picky”. With a good amount of trial-error, we found a configuration which “mostly works”: 6.36.4, be sure to run the latest routerboot also. We also reboot the devices (whole board, not metarouters) daily.

S.

5

Thanks sricci. That’s a sad reply.

I think at the very least, a force-reboot and force-stop of the meta routers should be implemented so that they can’t hang. A metarouter should not be able to crash the whole host system :frowning:

6

Let me summarize metarouter (mr) status:

  • mr is unreliable(?) Can you tell how you use mr?
  • mr not supported on CCRs and RB3011UIas
  • OpenWRT - no mr support in upstream project and builds provided by MK are obsolete
  • OpenWRT project is stagnant, but there’s a young fork called LEDE project

It looks like no good news :frowning:

7

  • mr > is unreliable(?) Can you tell how you use > mr> ?

We use it on RB450G to “virtualize” user CPE on some environments. Metarouter sees two interfaces: one is a dynamic interface bridged to the upstream interface on physical device (ether1, in this case), the other is a static interface (which may be ether2, 3, 4 or 5) which is the customer facing interface. There’s some firewalling configured on the metarouter (nat masquerade rule, some mangle used for policing / shaping) and some queue tree rules. Nothing fancy. We discovered that layer7 matcher in the metarouter firewall can crash the whole device under some traffic patterns, since we dropped them from configuration the stability has improved a bit…but it’s not here yet. It’s quite frustrating because we didn’t find a way to reproduce the issue, sometimes “just happens”; we’re evaluating solutions from other vendors which is unfortunate to us, because we have 4k+ mikrotik CPEs installed and the metarouter is seen by our system just as another CPE (so we can use the same management / provisioning tools we used to date).

  • mr > not supported on CCRs and RB3011UIas

No, it’s not.

  • OpenWRT - no > mr > support in upstream project and builds provided by MK are obsolete
  • OpenWRT project is stagnant, but there’s a young fork called LEDE project

I can’t speak about openwrt support since we never used it.

8

What do you use then?