By the posts and advice you write I believe your knowledge of MT could be used in some companies 
Yes, I think anav underestimates his skillset, while others overestimate theirs.
You two really need to get a room…As long as you understand each other so damn well 
Meanwhile, for those who can understand, that this is not a topic related to ‘admin skills’ but for mikrotik equipment. I believe that Mikrotik should really DO more tests with their products before selling.
Right now, I still have an old CRS226-24G that has an issue, reported by many users (ports stopped sending traffic after 4-5 days, and now 1-2 days after last update) that no updated fixed it.
Anyway, its that one is garbage.
Reality is: Mikrotik should do a better job at quality control. A lot better.
I am in far from a big Mikrotik client with around ~ 100 routers and ~200 access points, but still I had to RMA close to 10 routers for various reasons, ranging from DoA to flapping ports and mysterious crashes. Another 5 still pending investigation with lots of packet loss and 3 just quit working out of warranty. ~15% is a lot from my point of view.
Good part: they are pretty cheap compared to their competition.
That is so strange. I’m in the US. I have installed around 100 (mostly) routers for clients over about the last 5 years or so. Most are either RB2011, 3011, 4011, or CCRs.
I have had 1 CCR1009 with dual power supplies lose a power supply after about 1 month. Strangely they aren’t technically field-replaceable, so we RMA’d that one. I learned the RB2011 wifi was unreliable so didn’t use it. I have had no other equipment failures.
I’m curious, on your routers experiencing packet loss, do you have a firewall rule that drops invalids in the forward chain? If so, I’d be curious to see what happens if you disable that rule.
The first reason we buy Mikrotik is their products are cheap. For the features Mikrotik says they offer, I am willing to pay more, BUT to be more stable and less bugs.
This is more a TRUST issue. Why big companies buy Cisco, Juniper and Arista ?
I dont want to talk about router, but the switching part is not so good.
Folosesti si switchuri Mikrotik ?
First of all - sorry for your troubles.
As a fellow admin - I can feel your pain.
How we can help you without knowing your switch configuration and setup?
What is connected, how, what brand stays from other side of the link.
Can you give more details and send the config?
There are issues even between switches of much more of the expensive brands.
Also - write to MT support, they may provide you with quick solution.
The last option - use another brand but chose wisely.
Dell’s are good but have small hiccups with HP’s. Both are OK and a bit pricey.
Linksys …ah get MT better.
Aruba - not bad, price is OK, modular design.
Juniper - a bit strange to configure but stable and good. Modular lots of firmware versions and licence tricks. Almost Cisco but cheaper and with a twist.
Cisco - prevail all others but expensive as heck.
Using switches also, but very few, so cannot really comment on those.
Two CSS326. Both “modded” with two fans: one on the rear for air intake and one internal, blowing down on S+RJ10 modules. No problems with them besides crazy SPF+ modules temperatures.
Two RB260GSP. One crashed and had to netinstall. Worked fine after. One was just decommissioned while still working fine.
Small issue with RB260GSP was that it could not power even a small Cisco SPA VoIP phone, so I had to purchase external power bricks.
later edit: correction about about RB260GSP, was in fact RB960PGS used as switch.
Will try and get back with results.
Thank you for the idea. Did not try yet.
I agree. Many years ago i ditched ubiquity to mikrotik for all the features of networking packed in a device. I use it for networking a home to a huge hotel via capsman. I love and fanaticaly support a european company with such quality, features and RELIABILITY… But… Lately something changed the software to unreliable. After upgrades something stops working or malfunctions. At least use a good firmware version for stable release because thats im going to use for critical environments. I setup mikrotik to public authorities buildings with advanced routing and or multiple gateways vpns servers etc… please dont let me down and make me use a simpler but reliable equipment. I experiment with mikrotik but in my lab with new ros release. When i setup it to client i need RELIABILITY and when i get something useful at my lab i then deploy it to client. When it comes to reliability it is something that works as intended without needing reboot for years. Mikrotik and ubiquity does that but mikrotik has software advantage. Dont screw that. If you want to experiment ok but please at least put a reliable version to stable packages to deploy on production environments the last thing you want is to loose reliability as networking equipment.
I’m a network engineer at $dayjob, and my motto is simple: don’t upgrade unless you must. And ‘must’ means one of two things: 1) there turns up a colossal security hole in the software you’re running (and it must be in functionality you actually use) or 2) newer software has functionality you absolutely can’t live without.
You must create your own stability. No network vendor, be it MikroTik or the likes of Cisco or Juniper, can or will do it for you.
Ok. But how to build a network when i receive a router with a buggy software factory installed and i wont upgrade it because i fear the new is buggier? One crs i installed 1 year ago in replacement of an hp switch was port flapping out of the box and thank god the upgrade fixed that. I was at the point of reinstalling the hp switch back. Of course if it works dont upgrade it unless it is absolutely necessary but the thing is it wouldn’t work from the beginning. How to make it stable myself? Shall i rewrite its firmware? I think mikrotik releases firmware updates too often too early. My opinion is to cut stable update releases by half not every month a new one but to test and double check so to deploy a stable one. Developer beta releases should exist as already is for people who experiment and test and it should send reports at mikrotik automatically to improve their next release.
Yes, we should build our own hardware
As agnostic said, and this was the point of this topic, Mikrotik should make the stable releases more stable
And stop making us, the customers, your beta testers ! You can not just release a product and “lets see what happens” !
I understand, production is down, Bosses scream at you. Here is a story from a fellow network admin.
Cisco big expensive switch:
- ports up
- mac table has entries
- absolutely no error you can find with any cli command
Issue: anything connected in ports 1-4 does not work
After extensive reading I found out that for that particular switch CISCO groups each 4 ports under the same ASIC which failed without giving any error. Cisco replaced the switch.
My point? failure happens. it’s electrical equipment, it will fail sooner or later. Do not think Mikrotik is the only one with these issues. Yes, it has bugs but if they hire 1000 more people to work on them they will make the product more expensive. We would all like cheap and powerful equipment but it does not work that way. Main issue is that people buy Mikrotik and they see cheap Cisco/Juniper. Far from it. Mikrotik has its market and I am thankful they do it this way, it allows me to buy 1Gbps feature rich router at $100.
Failures do happen. But this is not the point.
The point is that Mikrotik releases an equipment with an OS that is not stable. This is because they do not test enough the OS before releasing to the market.
I allready said that we buy Mikrotik because is cheap and it has many features. Who would buy Mikrotik if their product were expensive with all this bugs?
As I said, if you care about stability and uptime, Mikrotik is not the product !
I would say the same for Windows which are killing me with their weekly updates and fixes but here I’m still using them
Thank you for your words! It’s so true.
I was facing issues with several new switches from MikroTik. Crazy bugs - support not helpful.
This week I had outage based on strange behavior of the 48 port switch - switch stopped switching on some ports in the range 1-8 and around 14-24 …
Only way Problem got solved was rebooting the switch - no log no error nothing … this sucks I am thinking to replace it with one of my old 3com Switches
Even I also face a strange vrrp issue - see my other posts - I can’t explain or find any reason for this - I guess it comes from a bug inside some MikroTik hardware …
Br
Mark
In general I can agree with that (I am just now in the process of migrating some internal systems at $dayjob from SuSE 10.0 to something current) but you should also consider that waiting too long to upgrade can also make it more painful to finally do so.
E.g. update procedures that support some automatic migration of configuration often fail to do so correctly when you make too big version jumps.
In the past there have been big changes in some parts of RouterOS, and upgrade would usually fix the config to cope with that, but I would not want to upgrade e.g. from an early 6.x version immediately to the current 6.47 especially on a router with a somewhat more complex config including switchports (master-port), IPsec, wireless with special settings, etc.
Especially not from remote or even when the only access to it is via the local network and there is no serial console or MAC-level access.
True (I’m looking at you, NX-OS 
).