I’ve always believed the long term branch to be better for deployments where stability is the most important.
However, I am curious to know if anyone uses stable or testing releases in a production system and why.
We use the Stable-Update branch,
We needed a Feature of the Stable-Version at some Point in Time,
and never went back to the long term branch.
We usually Update non-critical devices automatically.
For Exemple: Workstation-Router, Isolated AP, etc…
For the Backbone-Routers, Switches and System critical devices,
updates are manually triggered on our Update-day.
I don’t want to jinxs it, but we hadn’t hat a Problem yet! =)
On production: 6.46.8 without PoE, 6.47.9 & 6.47.10 when device have PoE.
For home AP 6.47.10
Production —> stable long term for anything complex or critical
Production —> Latest release for anything else
Production —> Never beta (you are fired)
My team always uses the long term code unless there are specific reasons to run a different branch.
We’ve used this approach to successfully (and stably) operate critical networks for ISPs that connect entire countries as well as multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies and even large social media companies.
We do the same thing for small ISPs and SME/SMB.
What’s more important is to run the same version of RouterOS in every router and switch when it’s practical. In larger networks this isn’t always possible, so we run the same version in core, the same version in the last mile, etc.