As much as I love The Dude, it’s clearly no longer a focus for Mikrotik. While other vendors continue to develop their management and monitoring tools, The Dude is still stuck in Windows land, doesn’t work on PPC (>1 year and counting without a fix), and the versions that do work under RouterOS have major issues and limitations (like the web interface not working).
Mikrotik should come clean and admit that they are no longer developing the Dude, and allow everyone to move on to other alternatives rather than keeping everyone hanging in the wings hoping in vain for something magical to happen.
Don’t hold your breath, v4b3 was released in March 2011 and hasn’t been updated since, as I said >1 year despite all of the various bugs and issues it has (e.g. not working on PPC).
And when I said “windows interface not working” I meant “web interface not working”.
Well you get what you pay for! I for one would love to see more features added to it. SNMP write among them. More support for non-mikrotik hardware such as Canopy would be awesome! We’d even pay for the software at that point. But for now it gets the job done and cost much much less than the Motorola/Cambium option!
I wish there were an official statement if The Dude were dead or not. I think it is a great product and no alternatives free or otherwise can compete because of the RouterOS integration. We are 100% MikroTik shop (router-wise) and have come to know and love the Dude over the past years. Really if we could just get a 4.X PPC package that worked I would be happy. Most of the edge routers that we deploy are PPC (RB1100/RB1200) and we would like to deploy the Dude package on these routers to use as an Agent.
Please let us know if The Dude is abandoned or not so we know whether or not to abandon hope.
I concur, at least let us know.. I was at a Mikrotik Training and about 30% of us used Dude but were all wanting to know whether to keep using or change..
For those of us using the dude now for many years and still finding ways to make it do bigger and better things are tired of the whining about how the free ‘beta’ software doesn’t work how they want it to work. Go buy one that does what you want it to do and quit cluttering up the forums, or post how well those other ones run on PPC.
