I’d say that reliability stands heads and shoulders above all other requirements, followed by performance. Simple set-up at the start and ease of support. Clients just want it to work 24/7 without failure or intevention. Everything else is secondary. Don’t forget, I’m talking SOHO set-ups here, not bigger companies - they’ll have the budget for the IT costs.
But as a techie, I love RouterOS and the sheer power. I’m currently in the middle of rolling out a Starlink based site consisting of farmhouse, caravan site & permanent lodges. Probably 30+ users wanting to stream Netflix. Before they shared and struggled with a 20MBps (if we were lucky) FTTC connection. Only yesterday did I connect up the farmhouse to the rest of the site. First time in a Cherry Picker installing a Ubiquiti NS-5AC NanoStation wireless bridge from the farmhouse to the rest of the site. Interestingly, I’ve always used these Nanostations as I’ve found them dead reliable. Never looked at Mikrotik PtP solutions (should I?).
At the moment, all this is going through a spare hAP ac lite! Impressed it works at all. But already been using the status reports of each interface to look at where the traffic is going and set-up a graphing report to get a better feel of the network.
But that’s only really of interest to me. Lots more work to do - replace that hAP ac lite as it’s really not up to the job. Plus upgrade some other networking components that are all 100MBps (been in there years).
Nothing. But gigabyte says, MT should focus on stabilizing and improving Winbox 4 first.
I think that developing several new project’s at same time could take too many developer resources at such a small company like MT. Winbox 4 is beta and is going to need a big amount of attention by MT to reach a stable release incorporating all the feedback from community.
WinBox was nothing to me, until it was made available as native Linux app. It’s an useful app however, I like sub windows more than tabs in browser, combined with ssh.
Maybe there’s nothing special feature wise. But, platform coverage increased, which might or might not be an important aspect in MikroTik’s adoption.
That would appear to be advertisement for “The Dude” IMO.
The problem in that post is using winbox to view dozens of logs from different routers. That is easily solvable by remote logging to The Dude – today, for free, without any waiting on new software. And, Dude will maintain winbox connections to multiple routers to view config from the map of devices.
While Mikrotik certainly could use a “new controller”… I just think more folk should at least try The Dude as it does some solve a few of the needs of a new controller. It’s relatively easily to setup for basic up/down monitoring, centralized logging, and viewing each router’s config. The Dude is VERY far from perfect - it does not help at all with config management & doing more “advanced” monitoring/alerting is complex multi-step process. But it actually does more than most people think for status/monitoring & logging.
Seen the screenshots of Dude and I was deeply frightened - I wasn’t brave enough to install it. Basically I did not want to find out if it is Wine compatible.
What’s nice is you don’t need the “scary” 32-bit X86 Dude client running all the time… the client just configures the “server package” running on a RouterOS - but it RouterOS that collecting data from monitored devices, not the ancient Dude client.
Additionally, once you create the Dude maps in client, they do show up in webfig as graphics with red/green/etc status as a graphic. So basically if you look at the 1990s UI as just the way to setup the “dude server” and/or view/extract collected data, it may be less scary.
What’s nice is you don’t need the “scary” 32-bit X86 Dude client running all the time… the client just configures the “server package” running on a RouterOS - but it RouterOS that collecting data from monitored devices, not the ancient Dude client.
Additionally, once you create the Dude maps in client, they do show up in webfig as graphics with red/green/etc status. So basically if you view 1990s Win32 UI as just the way to setup the “dude server” and/or view/extract collected data, it may be less scary.
My first device was a Chateau LTE12. This was the first v7 only device IIRC. I had to use v7 beta. The dude was long time not even available for v7. Long time it was the saying that it probably won’t ever be v7 compatible. But then it arrived for v7. But still the documentation lives at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:The_Dude (“This page was last edited on 10 April 2017, at 07:20.”). It was not ported to new docs at https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/. So I always assumed: The Dude is abandoned. It is there for legacy reasons and compatibility but should not be used. So just shrug.
The Dude has always been more or less in that status.
It would be better when it would be released as open source, so MikroTik would not have to work on it anymore and still it could be developed by enthousiast users.
FWIW, Dude client still works on latest MacOS Sequoia + homebrew’s wine@devel. Since the client will re-download itself for another version, that even work still (since I connected to v7.16rc4 Dude).
To @infabo, the Dude server package fits on a Chateau LTE12 while something like Prometheus/etc may do more, it a lot setup than just checking “enable” and picking a disk in WinBox4:
Also for LTE, I wrote up how to setup monitoring of the signal here: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/how-to-track-lte-signal-using-the-dude/163250/1
My only quibbles in years of usage is you cannot “move” a device from one map to another, and perhaps wine’s font randomness. Anyway, enough of my sales pitch for The Dude. This whole “new conroller” discussion is frustrating since some minor fixes in Dude would have gone a long way.
p.s. Even the Dude taskbar status icon work on Mac+wine…
… so a +1 to a native app for new controller UI - since these kinda things are possible with a native app vs. some HTML5 console…
Happy New Year 2025!
It’s been almost three years since this topic was created—any updates?
We know MikroTik tends to keep everything secret until the last moment, but even something like “We’re working on it” would be appreciated. On the other hand, a response like “We’re not considering the idea” would also be helpful to avoid making people wait for nothing.
I/We love Dude; however, the user interface feels outdated, like something from the '90s. If there’s no other controller to consider, a “facelift” for Dude would be greatly appreciated.
If there’s no other controller to consider, a “facelift” for Dude would be greatly appreciated. 