So I rarely post these kinds of threads but I thought I would this time around…
I recently decided to upgrade some of the routers in my home (2 of them).
I was running OpenWRT on most of them. I have about 2 decades of various software development and networking experience. I don’t specialize in networking generally, but have a good understanding of how a network stack works. All the work I do is in linux.
So, here are the issues I have come up against while using Mikrotiks RouterOS:
A) OpenVPN support is half baked at best. No UDP support and no TLS support… I am surprised this made it to production in this state as UDP + TLS is a fairly standard practice using OpenVPN. The “bug” has been reported here many years ago with no action from Mikrotik. I see ROS 7 beta now has at least UDP… Although you still have to authenticate using a username / password lol.
B) WDS support when using WPA2-PSK CCMP… I could for the life of me never get the WDS slave to authenticate. It would always show timeout out “unicast key exchange timeout”. This bug was reported here in (yikes!) 2008… And the solution is the change the WDS to static mesh… Did not work in my case… A mikrotik employee here said its due to a signal / “too far away” issue… No it is not, I can authenticate when using station / repeater no problem and am getting decent signal (75%+) between the two devices.
(Solution Below) C) The only way to block wifi clients based on MAC addresses is white list only… This make steering clients to a specific AP when using overlapping SSIDs a pain in the ass… Once again, very standard feature found in pretty much any 20 dollar router completely missed here…
D) No 802.11r/k support… I have read on here the comments about how its not ‘helpful’ as Capsman does some of this… Well yeah… Maybe not 802.11r, but 802.11k helps the CLIENT decide where to roam to… For devices that support it, its can be quite useful.
This is in the first week of usage… I will add the devices have been stable thus far so that’s a big plus. And the firewall / routing can handle 800-900mbits no problem with my dozen or so rules.
I will add, the devices I have purchased are all lower end, but the chipsets are fairly recent qqm artheos… So linux support is solid.
Would I have gone this route next time around? No.
I also purchased 2 Mikrotik minipcie adapters for my primary “mini pc” iot server upstairs… They have thus far been rock solid.
In my opinion, for anyone looking for a higher-end home router I recommend a mini pc (I purchased a Hytsou H5) with 2 (or more) mini pcie slots and just build your own. Yes the cost will be 3-4x more… But you will have so much more flex and the ability to do just about anything.
Frankly at least for the main gateway downstairs which which is being served by the HAP AC2, I should have gone with something even celeron J1900 based with 5 ether ports and threw in 2 of mikrotiks mini pcie adapters and called it a day.
That’s my opinion, let me know if I am missing something here. I thought the Mikrotik would last me 3-5 years since I do not expect my wan connection to go past 500mbit anytime soon… But with some of these issues I can already see the writing on the wall that an upgrade is not too far down the line. RouterOS as a whole can do a lot, but I can clearly see that its designed for people who like a nice GUI interface.