Mikrotik SUCKS

RouterOS General
1

First of all i want to introduce my self.
I’m IT engineer for over more then 20 years. I’m not newbie, seen and know a lot of things.
I was buying and setting up a lot of Mikrotik routers for the past few years. Usually customers had a basic needs like port forward, vpn, etc.
These simple configurations are easy to made.
But once you want to make something more interesting Mikrotik is ZERO user friendly. It is pathetic to work with some specific topics.
To be honest with you i was trying to understand and work with this platform. I even tried to pass Mikrotik certifications, but they did not allowed to do that online. You have to fly somewhere. I was waiting for L900. The new model. It’s quite nice, it’s arrived. And i pissed off. Really. I believe in the human life there are much more to do, then spend hours and hours trying to do more or less basic things. Mikrotik WHY are you so f***ing complicated and so unfriendly? What is the reason to be such a pain in the ass? Things that are easily done on hap ac3 are no more possible to do on L9000. Why? It stinks like microsoft. If you knew how to set up someting in winxp you will not be able to set up the same thing in win10. Just because everything is different.
Why this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZJ-pM89N7o work on ac3, but there is no way to set up on new L900?
I’m in love with linux and i’m in love with mac. I was really pushing my self to love mikrotik for years, but i see that live is too short to spend so much time on this extremely unfriendly platform. Probably i will switch to Cisco, OR please give me any other suggestions. What do you prefer and why?

I’m not a noob. I work with quite interesting and complicated linux platforms. But mikrotik… after more then 20 years working in IT, i feel stupid when trying to set up some quite basic things. I know what i want to do, i know terminology, i know and understand how things work, but in mikrotik it is somehow over the ass. Why so?

Maybe it is my fault? But where to understand this platform with the shortest possible time? I don’t want to spend weeks, months and years, trying to set up a 2nd VLAN. Come on. It should be done in couple clicks. But i’m digging this piece of … third evening. And it is not f*** working.

If i was a newbie in IT, then i should blame my self. But after half live in IT and struggling with quite basic things… .. come one…

I just disappointed.

Talking about Wireless. I’m in love with Ruckus. Very flexible, but extremely easy to understand platform. Try to do the same thing of Mikrotik, good luck. What is done in minutes on Ruckus, it takes evenings to set up on Mikrotik. WHY?

Looks like whole linux is much more understandable then mikrotik. If there is some fast learning tutorial or course, please share with me. I’m not spitting on mikrotik yet, but time is ticking. I believe i will move to the other platform. Cisco? PfSense? Also if you have any suggestions i would be thankful to hear them.

I’m just pissed of this this software. Asked for help from my colleagues, we spend hours together and could not make a simple tasks.

If i’m wrong, please correct me. If someone could help with the settings, also i would be thankful. all i need is to have separate VLAN with it’s own IP range. with is own VLAN. With it’s own SSID, and ONE or TWO ethernet ports, that are connected directly to the same VLAN and 2nd DHCP pool.

For years i was trying to learn and understand this platform. Where is my fault (or manufacturer) that i could not. I’ve learned linux faster then mikrotik.

Going to sleep today. Will 100% switch back to Rukus as for wireless solutions, but for the routers, i’m stuck… Help me to move out of this stuck situation. I would like to learn and understand mikrotik, but don;t want to spend all my life doing this. Believe that there are better options, with much smaller labyrinth to pass trough.

2

Read the subject and the first couple sentences and immediately got bored. Best of luck network guru.

3

The author is clearly a man-child.

I have my problems with MikroTik, but I have a problem with Cisco, Juniper, Arista as well. No vendor is perfect.

As a network engineer, I work multivendor on per use-case and business-case basis. Good luck to the OP.

4

Good luck to you to, empty commenter.
There is no need to have higher IQ to write that basic comment, you just write.

5

Most of the problems are solvable over 1,2,3,4 hours. With Mikrotik i stuck for weeks. Why so?
I learned linux, chef, jenkins, ms ad, ms365, azure, and much more. They are somehow intuitive when having basic knowledge you only need some little push to go trough. But with mikrotik, most in the time i feel like a newbie. Like a man, who never seen a router, o the man who does not understand tcp/ip and etc. I’m not blaming 100% mikrotik. Maybe it is my+mikrotik incompatibility. …but some of my colleagues, who are very smart at networking and servers, also stuck mostly with mikrotik.

6

According to what I see, you posted seven times so far in two separate threads, including this one. I quickly read the other thread, and frankly I dont get how an “IT engineer for over more then 20 years” don’t get that if he wants to have a port part of a specific VLAN he needs to have an access port and tag the traffic with the correct vlan id.

Thus, the answer to your “why so” question, is IMHO a chair/keyboard-interface issue.

Regards,

7

Sorry no spoon feeding here, go back to yo momma!
https://mikrotik.com/consultants
https://mikrotik.com/training/centers
https://www.udemy.com/topic/mikrotik/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waDRjGJ8_Ek

If you had asked for cloudflare zerotrust tunnel for all devices, I might have perked up. :slight_smile:

8

You and your colleagues should get offline training. You are right, MikroTik’s UI is counter-intuitive, even for those who knows Linux, and you’ll spend months mastering it yourself. However, knowing how these UI sections interacts with hardware and with each other, it will not be harder than any other router, and I doubt you would like to switch WinBox to anything else then. If you like Cisco then you may work with MikroTik from a CLI, not much differences in work approach. I don’t know any enterprise-level vendor with a flat learning curve.

9

Most people I know that have some sort of background in networking and who are trying to make Mikrotik work for them go through this at the beginning. It’s a normal part of the process.
It takes some time, but you’ll learn to love it eventually. Especially if, like you said, you are somehow stuck with Mikrotik.

Mikrotik made and makes a lot of interesting and quirky design decisions. Some of them are because they are direct reflections of the underlying Linux components used to build a feature (such as bridging, and with that VLAN filtering). Some of them are because Mikrotik decided to in-house develop implementations for standards in their way (mostly routing algorithms or stuff like DHCP) rather than using a more featureful or simple to use open-source implementation.

Many times, in threads similar to this, people will “threaten” to go to other networking brands, such as Cisco. I always wonder what this is supposed to achieve? Mikrotik never seemed to have aligned itself with any of the larger brands’ feature sets. Sometimes it feels like they deliver features that nobody asked for at a time when other stuff would have been more pressing. That makes it seem that Mikrotik is largely immune to outside forces, which can be both good and bad.

So take a breath, read the documentation and eventually it’ll come to you. It did for me.

10

I absolutely stand by MikroTik because it’s the ultimate solution for all my networking needs. It’s a powerhouse that combines a firewall, wireless, router, and switch all in one device. If you’re whining about the UX/UI, then it’s clear to me that you’re just a lazy old man who can’t be bothered to learn anything new. Why don’t you go ahead and splurge on some other complicated networking device setup with your endless supply of money? That seems to be the only thing you old folks know how to do!

11

If you want help from this forum then you have wrong approach, coming here and bashing on ROS and Mikrotik.

If you want fancy interfaces you can try Ubiquiti, there you have few clicks and volla, you have second VLAN enabled, add second SSID for your guests.

Heck you even have Guest WiFi option so you are one click away from achieving your goal.

As a complete noob in networking (my field of work is electronics.) i learned a lot from this forum and people here will always help you, but not if you have this attitude.

And yes, it’s a bit more complicated on Mikrotik but it’s really not that hard…

12

It seems popular to attack the person that complains instead of taking it serious…

We have here persons that work indirect for the government that act the same and attack and supress opinions from citizen. I get the same feeling here, as with that.

13

Problem is, Mikrotik won’t change anything just because someone complains about something about their products or software.

For eg. in my line of work, you have one producer of equipment from Poland. They talk to installers, want to know what features are needed, what needs to be changed and they act on it.

On the other hand we have producer from Germany, they could care less about feedback from installers, their software, mobile apps are garbage and they look like they are written in era of windows 98.

Same as Mikrotik, they released wifi 6 like few months ago… there are so many features that are requested by us and nothing… (Okay some features are introduced)

I get it that OP is frustrated because he needs to spend hours to configure something and if there is possibility for him to change vendor then he should go for it, only problem is… Other vendors are expensive…

14

So you’re telling us that you listen and help in the same way, with the same joy and same will a person who comes to you saying “Msatter, you SUCK” and another one saying “Msatter. I have a problem can you help me please” ? You whether are psychiatrist and are paid for this, otherwise should apply for future canonization. :slight_smile:

15

@msatter … I could not agree more !!!

To the OP … RouterOS is a Linux based proprietry shell called an OS … Yes I do agree with much of your comments … MikroTik does not have the intelectual power to make ROS KISS

Regardless its very popular among technocrats → me being one of them … :smiley: …

16

There are always positives and negatives with any solution.

Mikrotik positives: relatively inexpensive, flexible, no ongoing licensing costs, support lifecycle is fairly long (hardware will work for a long time)

Mikrotik negatives: Can be a steep learning curve compared to other vendors (changes on every hardware rev or software update), no paid support so priorities/SLAs can’t be set

Solution: hire a consultant to do the work for you

17

Turning the other cheek…

18

wow for ~20 years of “experience” OP should learn SDN stuff and not individuall and cost-effective setups

there is no, i repeat NO, vendor out where all is calm-and-charm to just setup - even meraki has some fairly downsides. same goes for cisco, juniper, palo alto, barracuda, checkpoint (and i work and worked with named vendors)

tbh. saw the post, first 5-6 sentences, tl;dr

19

Hasty generalization!

20

Time for the mods to lock and throw away this useless thread.