RB1200 - Final consensus?

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

I’m considering buying a used RB1200. Having found several unresolved threads discussing problems with this product, combined with its utter disappearance (moreso than other discontinued products) from the routerboard.com site, I have to ask: what is the final consensus on the RB1200? Is it:

  • fatally flawed and to be avoided for production use?
  • usable with certain caveats (which are…)?
  • perfectly usable now but still suffering from early stigma?
2

I’ve been using a RB1200 for about 9 months now in production running 5.16 and it has been reliable for us. It did reboot itself once via the watchdog for a kernel panic after about 3 months but recovered gracefully. I’ve got several NATed networks, VLANs, multiple DHCP servers, SNMP, several static routes, IPSEC with PPP, and firewall rules (< 50) configured. No hotspot, dynamic routing, or queue trees. On a busy day this thing can only NAT about 300Mb full duplex.

Issues/Caveats that affect this configuration:

  • IPSEC latency - it’s reliable, just slow
  • ether9/10 have issues, so we avoid these ports (this was documented somewhere)
  • Throughput is low with NAT and firewall rules (< 500Mb)

Not sure how this router would do with 6.x or even 5.26 but seems pretty happy on 5.16. I’d rate this router for what it does as perfectly usable and stable.

Hope this helps!

3

I had a 1200 in production for some months, never let me down. Replaced as it was a little underpowered. A good all rounder for a small network. Dont expect to do any layer 7 filtering though