Those of you who are testing 7.18 might have noticed, but most of you probably did not notice yet.
There are plenty of new features in one specific category - storage.
Those of you with devices that support any kind of external storage, like the RB1100, X86, CHR systems or even devices with USB hubs with external drives attached, it would be great if you could test things like:
I want to share my feedback about SMB client (/disk add type=smb âŚ) and about working with large amount of files.
After connecting a new SMB share with about 50 files, a file tree is loaded pretty quickly, all files are visible in WinBox, but then RouterOS starts doing something weird. It creates a huge load on a network and eats a lot of traffic from SMB server. Within about 30 minutes it has downloaded about 4.5 GB of traffic from the server. And this never stops until you dismount your SMB disk. What the hell is it doing? (TILE, 7.18beta4)
On the Dude graph it looks like this:
.
Regarding woking with large amount of files, I often hear that you are improving the behavior for this scenario. But it will never work normally with large amount of files in current implementation. The reason is simple: RouterOS scans a whole file structure completely. If you have 10K files, 100K files, it will uselessly scan all these thousands of files, creating an unneeded load on network and server. And this process will begin over and over again after each reboot.
To work with large amount of files, file management mechanism should be completely revised:
RouterOS should never scan a whole file structure, only content of root directories on the disks.
In WinBox, âFile Listâ should be replaced by âFile Browserâ with ability to navigate between directories like itâs done in any OS.
CLI file commands should also change their behavior. If you type /file print, it should show the contents of root directory only. If you need to show the contents of some subdirectory, you may specify it in âwhereâ parameter like /file print where name~âsubdir/â. Sometimes, it may required to show the contents including subdirecories, in such case an additional parameter could be added, like â/file print include-subdirsâ for example.
In Linux there is an âlsâ command, so it shouldnât be a problem to translate file commands into âlsâ command accordingly.
It may sound wild for those who get used to current behavior, but without this, any adequate behavior with large amount of files is impossible.
P.S. Itâs still unclear if SMB client feature is incuded in ROSE-storage package, because it works even without this package.
Changelog tells you about how to do it, use the new parameters (not a bug)
*) file - allow printing specific directories via path parameter;
*) file - added ârecursiveâ and ârelativeâ parameters to â/file/printâ for use in conjunction with âpathâ parameter;
Meh, this shows how old (and grumpy) I am getting , personally I donât feel particularly excited, the whole stuff appears to be at the moment more wishful thinking than anything else, and anyway it all sounds to me like, to make the usual automotive comparison:
âHey! We added round wheels, an exciting new development from the square ones we had till nowâ.
(the triangular ones, one bump less, were tested but abandoned earlier)
I totally agree eworm.
this sccrenshot was made on a rb5009 with ROS 7.18beta4.
The failed script in the sceenshot downloads FW blocklists, merge them and create list entries.
To do this, some files (size <200kb) are downloaded, stored in âFilesâ and after creation of the âAddress Listâ in the FW menu these files were deleted.
It runs fine on every ROS before ROS7.18Beta2 and now Beta4.
The script itself is provided by eworm.
(please see at https://git.eworm.de/cgit/routeros-scripts/about/)
Please look at it, thank you!
All that fails the same way. Not every time, but way too often.
As this is racy you need to remove a file thatâs not too old. Perhaps I should open an issue and provide more details⌠The problem is that behavior on racy things changes all the time, so there is no perfect reproducer.
Swap appears to be working great since Iâm now able to spin up a minecraft server on my ax3
While previously trying to get it working, the router would crash with an OOM condition.
Exciting features⌠? I donât understand why other networks products, forti, xtrem, cisco do like you !
Minecraft on container on network security gateway⌠itâs a joke ?
And during this time, with evolution of routerOS, their more and more constraints about device mode, functions before allowed are now locked and need the physical button press to be changed. When router are far, itâs a great feature, for sure ! But itâs better to transform routerOS as a NAS, gaming serverâŚ
Donât want to sound rude and sorry for offtopic, but having hardware on remote location without having additional devices (like GSM-sockets or something similar) that allow to remotely power-cycle your hardware is very strange at least. Anything could happen and power-cycling often helps. In case of device-mode changing it would also solve the problem. So, as to me, having such devices is a mandatory thing and I donât know how to explain when people donât have them. May be they like to drive (or even fly) to their remote sites each time something happensâŚ
This is RouterOS, not StorageOS. If you desire to add file management and make a NAS out of a router then just spinoff ROS into another branch that is developed separately. Storage device does not need BGP and MPLS and router/switch does not need NFS, Btrfs support, RAID, NVMe over TCP or fancy UI for collaborative file sharing. You already have strong base with basic networking, just cut unnecessary slack, integrate rose-storage into base and sell it as separate OS to be ran on new class of devices.
The naming of ROSE is also pretty poor, âRouterOS Enterpriseâ - 100% enterprise storage, 0% enterprise networking.
You can run Greylog or Grafana.
I wouldnât dare any more than you would dare to run it on Junos :> Possible? Yes, absolutely! Good idea? In hell.
Those who are poo-pooing things havenât been paying close attention to the hyper-convergence of functions the last decade or two. Cisco built a virtual router for VMware 15 years ago, and VMware created vSAN shortly thereafter. Now you have Proxmox VE + Ceph, and with a CHR (or two) in the mix, or FRR on the bare metal, customers can build (and have) practically anything on commodity hardware.
Look at what TrueNAS has done with TrueNAS Scale. You put the server on a decent PC, spin up your ZFS pool, go download a bunch of free apps, and/or put a VM on the box. MSPâs love this kind of stuff.
It looks like MikroTik is trying to get their hardware and software into this market. You can do a barebones PC, or you can buy a beefy router (RB5009, CCR2004, CCR2x16 or CHR + Ampere) with simple storage, and, like with TrueNAS scale, load up apps (micro services) on your router.
When ROSE came out, I put an NVMe to SATA adapter in a 2116, punched a hole, ran some thin SATA cables out, and hooked up six SATA drives in a bay the size of a CDROM. It works pretty well.
The advantage MikroTik has over a PC is wirespeed switching/routing (on Marvell platforms). I run a bunch of containers on my 2116. Going to have to add the Minecraft one (didnât know it existed for ARM64).
