R.I.P. 532

RouterOS General
1

I’ve just had to return my first (and last) RB333 to my distributor as although the board powered up every time it failed to boot three times out of four, regardless of whether I was using PoE or jack - tho’ in truth I was unhappy with the design which piled three radio cards on top of each other (Cross-talk? Heat?), and its minimum power requirement of 12v which is a problem when you’re using batteries on a remote site.

I gather it wasn’t the first 333 he’s had returned with the same problem and he’s no-longer supplying them. I have a need for three cards in this situation but the 433 won’t be available in this neck of the woods for at least another three weeks and the RB600 won’t fit in any enclosure I use.

My distributor has no 532s left but fortunately has a couple of daughterboards for them left and I do have a 532 I can pull from another location so with that and a daughterboard should be able to get the site running in a couple of days.

I’ve also had problems with the 133 that I never had with the 112. In fact I had a superbly functioning, trouble-free network built on the 112 and the 532, and the 532As with their 400MHz CPUs, 128MB hdd and extension memory slots I found to be rugged and reliable and quite fast enough to handle anything I was ever likely to throw at them.

I miss them. R.I.P. 532 - victim of change for the sake of marketing.

2

HI,

why only 2 cards in 433? : /

3

3 cards work fine without issues, even XRs and other high power ones.

4

I agree with you.. I tried it.. but.. RB433 have lots of problems with firerwall in ROS v3.9. I can’t enter my RB433 with LAN or WLAN, and with console it makes me a lot of timed out errors.. It says that I have to make supout file and send to support.. but I cant download it in telnet.. hahaha.

Now I try v3.5.. let’s see how it works : P


Martín

5

Is this on a testbench in a nice air-conditioned workshop in a Latvian winter or in something like a nice white airtight DCE Die Cast Aluminum Enclosure from Pacific Wireless mounted on the sunny side of a pole in midsummer anywhere between 45’N and 45’S latitude?

I was considering three Mikrotik R52Hs in these slots and the middle one would have had the heatsink of the lower one around 1mm from its underside and its own heatsink 1mm from the underside of the card above with one of the four sides completely blocked and two others obstructed by the clips. Seems to me that the ‘issues’ that kind of thing might cause could take a while to develop.

Even putting aside heat and cross-talk ‘issues’ it’s simply bad and thoughtless design - changing or replacing a wireless card is fiddly enough when you’re hanging in a harness 10m up a mast. When you have to take out two other cards before you can even get to the one you want - and either fiddle with those flimsy u.fl. connectors or leave the cards hanging from them - you kind’a wish you had the joker who thought it looked a great idea on paper up there with you.

Sorry Normis but even if you can get away with it I personally don’t like it enough not to ever buy a 333 or 433, and I’m going to leave it to others to find out how well cards double-parked in the 600 work over time.

But the 532 with a 502 daughterboard? Give the man a coconut.

6

Combination of XR+R52+XR works good and there are no heat or RF issues. If you are working in a hot environment, you can install fans inside the box, there are Fan headers on the board.

7

If there are no heat issues, why are there fan headers?

In any case installing fans inside the box is a great idea when you’re sitting around a table somewhere with the project groupies drawing circuit diagrams on the backs of envelopes. I use these things outside in the real world where they have to be protected from moisture and dust and insects so external ventilation is not something to be encouraged while the box I use is 250 x 180 x 50mm so stirring the air inside it isn’t going to achieve much - especially as there isn’t going to be much air actually passing over the cards anyway given the way they are enclosed on three sides.

Moreover two of my current sites and the third in planning are having to be remotely powered, and while you can talk casually about installing fans, having to cater for them when planning solar panels and battery capacity is no small thing, both as part of the design headache and the additional expense.

Although the voltage monitor on the 333 is a great idea I hope you’ll stick with, as far as I can tell there is no temperature monitor let alone temperature-triggered switch on the board for the fans, so you either envisaged them being scheduled by a script(?) whether they are needed or not or turned on an off manually when someone thought they might be needed.

Anyway, I’d argue that better design would avoid the need for fans in the first place but what does my opinion count for? After all, I’m only a customer.

8

dunno.. I just don’t know… but…

We have like ± 40 RB333’s installed all over the place…

Summer tops at +45C
Winter - down to about 4C (only early mornings)

We have NEVER had ONE issue with ANY of the 333’s - except… drop the power .000001 :slight_smile: – volt below 12Volts and you’re looking for trouble. We standardised ALL of our RB333 Base Stations on batteries using “nice” battery chargers - and like I say - NO issues…

Standard practice is when ANY RB arrives we do a /system reset-conf and load the latest WORKING ROS (3.9)

We only replace the RB333s as and when we require a RB600 to take up the load - and then move them down the line as “edge BSS”

Most - if not all have 3 x cards installed in mixtures of R52/H/XR5 - and as long as the power is good they work really fine.

Tanker

9

.
.
.
ahhh… forgot to mention -

We only use the Power Input Socket off the batteries and not the PoE

T

10

why have Fan connectors? Strange question. What if you want to put it into the cener of Death Valley? I’m saying that the cards don’t cause much extra heat, and the Fans are there if you have too much heat combined from all factors.

11

…

or…

If you suffer from sweaty palms or sweating brow… plugin a fan or 2 to keep you cool while making off that troublesome LMR… hehehehehe
(sorry)

12

OK. No doubt it’s better to have them and not need them than vice versa.

But I’ll bet you don’t have a mains supply of power in the center of Death Valley, and while presumably solar isn’t a problem there you now have to factor into the panel and battery sizes the need to power fans and think about when you want them to run and not run and probably pay for two so’s there’s a backup and get an enclosure that can cater for them and I’ll bet you’d still worry about what might happen if both fans seized up, as they will eventually being mechanical devices.

Whereas I’ll bet you could put a 532 in the center of Death Valley in a standard enclosure and forget about it, and it would go forever.

Only you can’t 'cos they don’t make 'em any more.

And even if heat isn’t a problem the arrangement of these cards still makes handling them in the field an unnecessary pain. Every time you touch one you risk damaging the connectors or the card itself, yet you’ve no choice but to interfere with one if not two perfectly good cards to get to the second or third. With the 532 and 502 daughterboard you could get to any one of four cards without touching another one.

I suggest it’s the little differences - the little bit of thought and care in design that can make life so much easier for the guys at the sharp end - that make a big difference when it comes to deciding who’s product to buy. In that regard Mikrotik had been doing a damn good job but to my mind that’s beginning to slip a bit.

R.I.P 532.

13

I think the 532 is going the route of the old cisco 2500s. A fantastic workhorse platform that is getting replaced by new rookies that many of us view as untested. :slight_smile:

Seriously, great work during the lifecycle of the 532. It has had the type of reliable history that you guys should shoot for for all of your future platforms.

14

when the RB532 was the actual product, everyone was crying for RB230 and said that RB532 was bad and unreliable :smiley: That’s how product evolution works.

15

I certainly wasn’t crying for the 230. I thought the 532 was great.

Of course that might be because I only came in when any problems with the 532 - the problems making it “bad and unreliable” - had been sorted out.

Because that is how product evolution, any evolution, should work - you take a product, iron out the bugs, listen to what people say about it and use that input to make it even better. Getting to the stage of having evolved a great product like that and then scrapping it to start again with another set of bugs and unreliabilities because of a perceived need to always be 'bringing in the new" is certainly not “intelligent design”!

16

As an RF engineer, why would you LOAD up a single router with more than 2 Radios to begin with.
You can take the stance of power consumption, but we all know the real consumption is with the cards themselves and not in fact the routers.
Real performance is realized when one, loads up as few cards as possible onto as many routers as possible, all in individual enclosures.

Truth = 532 was at end of life.

Just because 2 - 3 people do not like the evolutionary path of a product, does not indicate that it was the wrong road taken.

Just my point of view.
:slight_smile:

17

I agree that more routers with fewer cards is to be preferred and hence would rather use two 532s each with two cards over one 600 with four. However the “evolutionary path” taken by MT seems to be to load more and more cards onto one router. Is the next in the 600 series going to have two Triple-shots offering six cards?

So I can’t agree the 532 was at the end of its life. It’s just my point of view but I would still be buying 532s if they were available and happily letting others solve the teething problems with the 333, the 433 and the 600.

18

Well said!

I do so love grumpy Friday nights.

MT would do well to understand that their customers are not all idiots.

We have beaten up on Wisp-router big-time this week about the product changeover stragegy that MT used this spring. Hopefully they have enough muscle with MT to pass it along. I did hear that we are one of a chorus of customers who are not happy.

Guys, its build season in the Northern Hemisphere!!! So lets make sure none of our customers can get product! And the product they can get is brand new, buggy to one degree or another, (like all new products from any manufacturer) and is only available in very limited quantities.

MT seems to feel that if you don’t go to MUMs you don’t care.

Without wishing to offend anyone, I learned a very long time ago that the people who are easy to reach simply don’t matter. The people who make the real decisions aren’t generally the people that have time to go to tradeshows.

Better, faster, cheaper is great. Really cool and to be congratulated!! MT is generally speaking doing a heck of a job making that happen.

Unfortunately, as mentioned above, there are some serious concerns about RF management on some of the new multi-card Routerboards, but I have a much larger issue with the broader strategy on product lifetimes and end of life plans.

Please, MT – there is a better way to manage your product release strategy, and we really hope you are going to take some of this constructive criticism on board so we all have a better experience next time.

Its a shame we don’t hear from John Tully much on the forum any more. John was always great about listening to customer concerns. Seems like senior management today is either disengaged, hears but doesn’t listen, or listens but doesn’t react. Unfortunate…

George

19

http://s279.photobucket.com/albums/kk128/Tanker_jbl/

Mountain = 2000M (±6600ft)
Mast (we’re ½ way up at 100M (330ft) and this is before the “clean-up and tidy-up and close-up”.

This is a BSS with 4 x RB333’s and all of them have a combo of XR’s and RB52H’s

It services ± 160 clients and runs 3 x Backhauls

It’s been in service for 9 months now.

We feed 12 Volts up the mast from a charger and battery system.

No fans & no heat or RF issues.

T

20

hi Tanker,

You really gave me back some confidence. I have 8 rb333’s running as important AP’s and all have three R52H cards in them.

Ater reading this tread (and some other with sort a same atmosphere) I started to feel pretty worried about my setup with the rb333’s. I mean, I made the setup of my new network during the winter here in inland Spain and we are just waiting for the hot summer months with the backing sun to come. Secondly, I have up to now only a couple of test clients hooked up to the AP’s but the promotion to get many is starting this summer too. I hope cross talk or extra heating of the cards is not going to be an issue.
Third; I also had ´mucho problemos´ with previous rosv3 versions and was very reluctant now to use the latest update.

You gave me back hope that I might not see problems out of any of the three problem areas I just mentioned.
On some of the rb333 I have the middle slot used for 2,4Ghz and the two others for 5Ghz and space the freq’s as much as possible and suitable. So far not seen any crossover yet. Signal strengths are good with very good s/n ratios. Some of units are back hauls and traffic, although not very heavy yet, has seen no problems so far.

So, although I can understand the general feeling among some users the design could be better (and actually EOL the rb333 after such short live proves them right. MT must have had reasons to EOL these boards that fast) some real live tests (which you obviously are an example of) show it ain’t all that bad as some suggest.

Thanks for that.

Rudy

P.S.
I have a whole series of rb433 coming in so should have spare units available for any failing systems.
Up to now hope that they won’t have the rb333 problems if they had to start with…