I’m new to Mikrotik. But I’ve got many many years of router experience. I started with Linksys in the 90s, went to Netgear, cisco, Apple, Asus, wp-link, tc, juniper, notel, Ciena and finally, pfsence. So, I’ve been a pfsence guy for 10 years now. The first time I heard of Mikrotik was because I was helping in starting a WISP and Mikrotik looked like a popular choice for routers.
My first thought in looking at Mikrotik was, “this sh%^%s just too complicated”. Plus, a Windows ONLY Winbox software, looks like it’s some holdout from Window95.
But.. now that I have a few hours with this (webconfig), and understand that it’s actually an extremely complex command line router, with a GUI over the top.. I started to realize why people like this. Plus the hardware is way ahead of everyone else’s stuff.
So, hopefully, I’ll learn a few things, by hanging around here, thanks, everyone.
Looking back, I would prefer to enroll in courses, rather than learning it myself. In fact, all concepts are taken from Linux (after all, this is what it is), but you need to be an advanced network engineer in order to learn MikroTik “at a glance”. As for WinBox, many of us uses it via Wine from Mac or Linux. And many of us dreams about 95-style interface (“Classic”) for Windows too, it was just had a good non-distracting usability. I never heard about people who uses Webconfig for (seriously) configuring these routers. You may also use SSH if don’t like WinBox (but WinBox is a gem, indeed).
Learning yourself is fun. When I found RouterOS, I knew some basics in Linux, network config, bit of iptables, etc. With RouterOS (and especially WinBox) I was like fish in a water. I’m not saying that I knew everything overnight, but most of it was pretty intuitive.
Don’t look down on WinBox, it’s wonderful invention. It’s self-documenting, anything you want to add gives you dialog with available options, you just pick what you want. You always see what you have, things give you immediate feedback. Add a firewall rule, drag it where you want it, immediatelly see on counters that it gets hits, it’s perfect. Compared to playing in command line, it’s day and night difference (that said, RouterOS CLI is not bad either).
It’s true that some things got a bit more complicated, e.g. new bridge with VLANs may require to check manual. But all in all, with some previous experience it’s not difficult.
I knew far less than Sob when starting, and even less now realizing the more you know, the more you realize you dont know!
Keeps me going for sure and the possibility of new knowledge and ways to solve user requirements is much fun! Enjoy the journey!