Static routing to an MPLS-TE Interface?

RouterOS Forwarding Protocols
1

In Mikrotik V6, it was possible to add a static route to send a subnet directly to an MPLS-TE tunnel interface. There was a few situations where I found it very useful to do this in order to send the traffic down a tunnel with static hop paths.

In V7 this no longer seems to be possible. Is MPLS-TE now only available for VPLS / BGP, and no longer compatible with static routes?

For added context, the V6 tutorial here https://wiki.mikrotik.com/Manual:Simple_TE#Route_Traffic_over_TE has you adding an IP and routing directly with the TE tunnel interface that was created with /interface traffic-eng add

It seems that in V7, the same interface is now created with /mpls traffic-eng tunnel add but the interfaces in here do not appear as normal interfaces that can be routed to or have IPs assigned to them.

The benefit of the V6 way of doing things is that I could direct the downstream route of traffic exclusively from the edge router, just by setting up tunnels and static routes to them. Traffic could go backwards around rings, etc. Specifying multiple TE interfaces in the route would let me split the traffic with ECMP across many TE tunnels - it was extremely powerful.

I don't see any way to replicate that with the V7 limitations, but if there's some clever way to do this that doesn't involve either binding new IP addresses per tunnel, or L2 bridging, I'd love to find out how that would work. Until then I'll be forced to shoehorn a V6 Mikrotik somehow into things just for this one feature.

Thanks!

2

Picking this back up again, and as I understand it, the only way to use traffic engineering tunnels with a strict path now is to assign a tunnel with the same From / To address as a VPLS tunnel, which will then use the path assigned.

This seems to work as expected for a single path, but the problem I’m running into is that in V6 when I was able to statically route directly to TE tunnel interfaces, I could set up multiple tunnels that took different static paths to get to the router - and then route traffic accordingly.

Because of how TE tunnels in V7 are now assigned to always use the From/To router IDs that match the VPLS tunnel, it appears I can only have one TE tunnel per pair of routers now - so there’s no way for me to duplicate this functionality.

Is there any way around this? I’d prefer not to have to leave Mikrotik over this, as I’ve been using it with many WISP networks for years, but this one V6-only feature might be a deal-breaker.

Thanks!

3

same problem , i create a case for asking mpls-te , but have no result ， te-tunnel just work for vpls , others like bgp-vpnv4 can not be matched