RouterOS v5

RouterOS General
1

Hi there, I thought I wanted to start a discussion about RouterOS version 5 and where I would like RouterOS to go:

More SNMP
I would like to have more standard SNMP supported. Besides the topics that have been discussed earlier with SNMPv2, I would like to have more standard MIBs implemented. Among these MIBs would be the BGP MIB (http://www.oidview.com/mibs/0/BGP4-MIB.html), the OSPF MIB (http://www.oidview.com/mibs/0/OSPF-MIB.html) and various switching MIBs that relate to the switch chips.

More debugging
Most telecom products have various debugging options that allow a deep look at what is actually going on with packets and processes on the system. It would be great if you could have an overview on which subsystem is actually using the CPU, a little like Cisco IOS show proc cpu sorted, as well as detailed information of packet routing decisions. The more debugging you can allow the experts among the community to do, the less overwhelmed your support inbox will be.

Fast, stable BGP
There shall be no doubt that your own BGP implementation has come a long way, and it does work very impressively! However, it doesn’t scale that well when handed a full feed. It is not necessarily bugs I’m talking about, but the ability to work with the routing information live on a system. For instance, working with filters or just working with the routing table is heavy and has heavy impact on the CPU load. One of the interesting projects you might want to look a little at is OpenBGPD, the BGP system from OpenBSD, that handles BGP routing very, very good. It does this by splitting the BGP daemon in three processes, one that handles the process of installing routes in the kernel routing table, one that takes routing decisions, and one that handles BGP sessions. In that way, any manipulations of the routing table will not influence the running sessions, something I have seen the MikroTik BGP implementation do.
I want to be able to do arbitrary queries on the routing table without causing CPU spikes and without my sessions dropping.

The best IPv6 implementation in the world!
You guys should set a goal to have the best IPv6 implementation in the world, where every part of the IPv6 standard is supported 100%, including DHCPv6, IPv6 VPN, and all that.

Hardware
I don’t want to discuss to much about hardware, since this is about RouterOS and not RouterBoard, but in short I want more power! Fibre interfaces and powerful hardware accelerated routers! Yes, they do cost more to produce, but surely many of us will pay that price.

In short, I want a carrier-class routing operating system for a fraction of the price of your competitors :wink:

2

agreed!

Hardware based routing and forwarding will kick cisco gear ass!!!

3

Ok, the features I want to see:

Better flexibility with “mangle” filters.
e.g. Being able to mangle based on routing attributes such as BGP peer, community, next-hop. Maybe this could be integrated in to the routing filters…
Why? this will allow shaping based on BGP attributes, and allow different bandwidth limitations for different peers/paths/communities
On Juniper JunOS we achieve this with “policy-options” which are similar to routing filters on RouterOS e.g.

policy-options {
policy-statement mark_international {
term international {
from community international;
then class shape_international; this sets the “mangle”}
}

Improved IPSec
The current IPSec implementation in RouterOS is primitive in comparison to offerings from Cisco, Juniper and Fortinet. It is hard to configure due to obscure naming, and is missing support for “Virtual Tunnel Interfaces” making inter-vendor dynamic routing accross IPSEC almost impossible.

Fast, stable BGP
I agree with Eising on this one, the BGP on RouterOS is good, but it could be a lot better.

4

i would like to see a way to have webproxy be able to not cache files under a certain size. if that feature is already there then sorry i am stupid :slight_smile:

oh and maybe a program like winbox, but for Mac since i employ both PC and Apple, could call it macbox?

5

where to download routeros V5

6

it doesn’t exists

7

Correction: It doesn’t exist yet.
This was my attempt to start a discussion about in which direction the community thought RouterOS should move.

8

My suggestion

MUCH improved and expanded web GUI.

With products like the 750G at such a low cost and high performance vast amounts of people with -ZERO- networking experience at all will buy the units and then come here and post wildly trying to figure out how to “port forward” or block web sites. A interface with the same functionality and GUI/wording as say a retail linksys or dlink will allow far more sales to the public and reduce forum support.

With a simple web GUI the 750G could get sold retail in vast quantities.

9

I can agree with advanced debug. I found this thread looking for a way to find out why my CPU usage has gone from 5-17% from version4.x to a constant 30% on version 5.0

Everything seems to be working fine, but it is making me nervous. I have even installed EVERY unnecessary package in hopes of finding the issue.
I’m running an Intel ATOM and it has been working great so far. It even shows 4 cores in the resource window. But, I still don’t like the 30% solid CPU usage.

10

You’re not going to get this without designing your own silicon which is why Cisco costs alot :wink: Your not going to get cheap carrier grade for this simple fact, CPU’s handling BGP route tables and altering them is a very intensive task by its very nature, to do it quickly you need to have something that can handle it in parallel. The closest thing to this you could get would be MT adding CUDA support to pass these tasks off the graphics cards.

BGP is stable in ROS 4 except with full tables on underspec’ed systems, Load it up on the fastest single core XEON CPU and you should be fine. If your big enough to justify having a full route table you can afford the coin!

IPv6, No argument from me! Been pushing MT for a while now to get a complete feature set in ROS 5

11

I don’t necessarily disagree with any particular point of your here, but I’d like you to bear in mind that this post of mine was written October 22, 2009.
A few things happened with RouterOS since then, and BGP actually got slightly better, and by version 5 (which wasn’t even beta back when I wrote my original post), it’s going to be very interesting to run RouterOS on modern server hardware.

12

Haha, Didnt even see that. I do remember asking myself why I didn’t see this thread before.

ROS 5 isnt looking like its going to make the RB1100 handle routing filter changes with a full BGP table all too much, We’ve got users in another thread asking for 10gbit NIC support when even the most hardcore router you can build with ROS cant handle more than ~3gbit flowing thru the software stack (Yes I know that switching is fast but that doesn’t count when I need to route it!)

I try and use a Juniper/Cisco device as a kind of buffer for BGP, You get your full route table to it and do you ECMP or whatever there and have a slim feed running into your ROS network.

5’s starting to look good and the SMP support is kinda tipping their hat to us that we can expect some multicore RouterBoards at some point aswell, Because lets face it: It’s kinda hard to max out CPU on a x86 ROS box outside of routing

13

Man, how right you was!

Just set up impossible Lab with awesome opportunities… to find out that Mikrotik just don`t support OSPF-MIB… epic fail 8(