Man, talk about bitter/sweet!! Why bitter? Because nothing sucks more than when a new product doesn’t work right because of some crappy problem beyond my control with the manufacturering process. Sweet, well, we all know why we are here: the Mikrotik OS is awesome! I am still iearning it, but have come a long way in the last several weeks.
Anyways, I now have my 2nd bricked RB751U-2HnD Router out of 3 attempted installations so far. Symptoms: All lights and power flashing on/off very quickly. After the 1st one bricked, I posted questions about it here:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/another-bricked-rb751u-2hnd/53269/3
So for safety sake since the 1st one bricked, I have been running the ones that I am going to do the new installs with here at the office. I upgraded the firmware to the lastest, which at the time of this post is v5.12, turned off the wireless, and just let it run with only the power plugged in. Except for playing around with it, I don’t even configure them until I am onsite.
Once onsite, I plugged it in where I wanted it, looked at it from Winbox, clicked on the menu to reset the configuration, and on the reboot, it bricked. Very very disappointing. I had to get up very early to be onsite for this client for the installation. And stupid me did not think to bring spares with me, which I will definitely do when I return.
I have seen several places where folks were trying to be helpful and suggested a netinstall. But if you are fortunate enough to have not experienced this, it does not go into any kind of boot mode, because as soon as you turn it on, everything is flashing and that is all it does. “MikroTik Support” on here has said to go through the process of doing a RMA with the company I bought it from, which they in turn require a ticket # from Mikrotik. Someone else mentioned jacking up the power from 12V to 24V and it worked for them. But “MikroTik Support” again said it was a faulty board and really needed to be sent back in for warranty work. I did it on the 1st one and am doing it on the 2nd one now. But it sure is a slow process and I don’t even have the 1st one back yet.
I am posting this as an informative post so others having this problem will know more about it. The best thing I can suggest is that if you are doing any type of work for clients and are using any Mikrotik stuff, buy extras! I bought 10 RB781’s for 8 installs, one for the office and then 1 spare, and out of the 3 attempted installs, 2 have been duds.
Mikrotik Support says the problem was fixed right away and that most will never see this problem, with over 99% of the product working fine. That might be the case for some people, but the math does not add up in my case: 3 sites, 2 bad RB751’s, 2 good RB751’s, and still another visit needed for installing another new RB751 at the 3rd site. Right now, we’re at 50% not working.
These guys really need to do 100% of QA on these known ones with issues. I am sure they know the S/N range of the potential bad ones and pull them from sellers and check them, or do something. I am trying to tell my peers in IT how great Mikrotik is, but this does not look good at all. I don’t want a canned response from “MikroTik Support” saying we have already addressed this issue, because this issue is still affecting me today on January 26th 2012 on problems that were going on as far back as August of 2011 that I can tell from other posts. I had to wait over a month to recieve my product from Streakwave because they were waiting on new inventory to come in, which for me was around the end of December.
My intentions are not to bash Mikrotik here. But people need to know what is going on. And just as important, Mikrotik needs to give a little better answer than sharp replys with explanation points at the end of sentences about this and locking topics so no one else can respond to it, because I did go the extra mile and asked the additional questions. People do need to know that flashing units are bad and need to be RMA’d. But for a small business like me, I need the extra re-assurance of knowing what steps are being done to fix this and that it will not happen again. It is easy to sit behind a desk and tap away at a keyboard and get aggravated with users on a forum that are asking for help; a forum that is supported by paying users of products they have opted to buy instead of looking at open source options. And it is a whole another thing to be in the buyer’s shoes, putting one’s reputation on the line with a product that had some issues of some sort with either design or assembly.
I would love to be using Mikrotik for all of my clients where this is a good fit and am even more excited about the product than I was before. But like I said, I think we all need some better re-assurances than what has been given so far.
The last configured part was wireless. Poor hardware…
