I have a weird problem with my RB951G (RouterOS 6.1) and certain internet radio streams. Setup is as follows:
[Cable modem]—(ethernet cable)—[RB951G port 1, interface = ether1-gateway]
[A/V stereo receiver]—(ethernet cable)—[RB951G port 3, interface = ether3-slave-local (master port = ether2-master-local)]
The A/V stereo receiver has built-in “internet radio” functionality.
The problem is that some streams exhibit consistent, constant dropouts. As a specific example, Storyville (http://221.241.201.253:8000) constantly drops and rebuffers, starting within seconds of selecting the stream, even though it is a totally typical 128kbps MP3 stream as far as I can tell. Moreover, other 128kbps MP3 streams work just fine (for example, http://149.174.106.58:80/radio_paradise_mp3_128kbps). I have no idea why this happens.
When I replace the RB951G with a cheap consumer-grade Belkin router, this problem goes away completely.
Can anyone suggest how I might get started debugging this problem?
No, I never did solve the problem. I’ve tried every ROS release from 6.1 (default out of the box) to 6.11, but it never went away. My support ticket about this problem got bounced around between MT techs for months, but never resolved.
I spoke to one of the US-based Mikrotik consultants listed at http://www.mikrotik.com/consultants some time ago (don’t recall which one, unfortunately) and he said he has seen similar problems occasionally. His observation was that (paraphrasing) the software-defined switch chip chosen by Mikrotik for these boards simply doesn’t play nice with some Ethernet controllers in other devices, and that therefore no ROS upgrades would ever resolve this issue.
Honestly, between this and the fact that I’ve been seeing wireless signal dropouts on multiple devices (Win laptop, Mac laptop, and several phones) in my back room, even though it’s <15 meters line-of-sight and none of those devices ever exhibit similar problems anywhere else, leads me to conclude that this RB951G is simply junk. I’m not sure if I just got a defective board (which would be the second one in a row – my RB751G was dead out of the box with the “blinking lights” problem) or something more fundamental in the design, but I’ve wasted way too much time on my 951G as it is. I am planning to recycle it as soon as I have time to get a replacement router.