Hi all, I just obtained a new CCR-1009-8G-1S-1S+ with RouterOS 6.25 and would like to see if anyone has any advice about some difficulties I am having with it out of the box, before I file a support case about it.
This is the first MikroTik router I’ve used. However this is not my first time doing networking. Therefore I have been able to easily find out how to do things in the land of RouterOS but I have experienced some things that both A: cannot be my fault, and B: seem unreasonable and prevent me from considering the product in an enterprise environment.
I’d like to achieve a resolution to the matter before I spend too much time evaluating the product if it’s going to turn out that I need to use something else. Perhaps a different unit or model might have better luck… A person I know who I showed this unit to was surprised to see it and liked it and said “it must be a new model” so I’m guessing they only know about older stuff.
What’s been happening is:
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when I try to set settings, it might not take, for example, when I click the arrow to get a box and put in an address, then click apply, the box disappears and I have to do it again, or
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Inconsistent operation of atomic UI elements. (ie, enable or disable button) For example, I make a NAT rule, and then later I’m trying to make another one and it isn’t working, so I try disabling the first one to see if something I’m doing wrong is causing a conflict between the rules I’m making. Once it’s disabled and my test pings stop working as expected, I try doing other work, but later when I come back and re-enable my first rule it doesn’t work. I found out that I had a situation where only one or the other would work, so I eliminated all but the one rule, and did nothing but enable and disable as a test. When I enabled the rule, it only started working halfway - my ping of a lan address on the other side of the router worked but my ping to google did not. Then I disabled it, things stopped working as expected, then i enabled it again, and both my pings started working, much to my surprise. Then to be thorough about my testing, I disabled it again, and this had no effect. The rule was disabled, both pings should have stopped working, but the router just went ahead and kept on NATing based on the rule anyway. I even verified from the CLI that there were no enabled NAT rules. I didn’t know how to reset just the NAT part of things, so I had to reboot the router to get it to stop NATing.
These kind of problems are what give me great concerns as this kind of quality is unusable in the enterprise environment - I need to be able to maintain the network and make changes and have them actually work, and without causing anything else to break, and most certainly without having to reboot the router when it shouldn’t need to be. If i go segregating the network in to bunches of subnets and using these routers to do it, I could have a situation where I’m taking down access to entire racks or buildings for hundreds of users and I can’t risk that.
I’m an experienced Cisco and Procurve network administrator, but with those products I’ve never seen a UI element that just didn’t do what it’s supposed to, or had to reboot the unit because it just ignored a command and didn’t change operation in accordance with the command… Could this be just one bum unit? Should I put in a support case and/or have it replaced? They say try talking to people on the forums first. Should I just reinstall RouterOS on the unit myself and see if the behavior changes? Or is that not necessary because something else will fix it? Has anyone else ever seen this kind of behavior from one of these units?
It’s worth it to us to just pay for Cisco in order to not have these problems, but I really want to resolve this, as I had high hopes to find a Cisco alternative.
Thanks anyone for any advice or help!