Two questions

RouterOS General
1

Hello community,

I work in a NGO, we have more than 100 sites, specially in Africa. Some months ago we decided to use the Zyxel USG 20W as our router but we are not 100% happy with it.

We have bought one RB2011 to make some tests and we would like to know:

  • Is it possible to centrally manage all the firewall rules for the routers? Zyxel allows it using a graphic interface and I think that with Mikrotik you need to do it scripting, isn´t it?

  • When someone in the field makes a VOIP call (Cisco phones) the Zyxel routes the connection through a vpn connection, is that possible with Mikrotik? I guess it´s possible.


    The Internet connection in the field sometimes are quite bad and we would like to monitor the latency, BW, packet loss, I think the best method is by using CACTI, is there any better option ?


    Well, thank you very much for your support and keep using / working with Mikrotik since I think it´s the way to go.


    Regards

2

To answer:

  1. You can use flashfig to mass configured RBs. You need direct ethernet access however (EoIP tunneling works tho) Other then that, you would have to script it, or write your own application using the API, which is not that hard really.

  2. Easily done.

  3. Monitoring using Cacti is probably the best.

3

Thank you very much Tomaskir for your help!

Unfortunately I think that my idea of using Mikrotik was too late. Anyway, since I consider it the best option and it’s sure that the future management application will make it easier to manage, I will make a strong advise in consider the router whenever is needed an upgrade or improvement.


Thank you again.

4

We used to use Zyxel a few years ago. Horrible bugs, lack of features (some features that worked normally, didnt work on PPPoE interfaces, etc.) and the price made us switch to Mikrotik.

5

I can imagine that they have improve in these years but I take not of your point.

I hope the Dude will be improve so more easy management is provided.

Thank you for your support :wink: