Before I dish out $260+ US, I would like to see what other users experiences are like with RB4011.
I am particularly interested in RB4011 + WiFi.

There is seems to be a mixed bag of opinions about RB4011, and being a relatively expensive unit the cost of failure is fairly high. Even if I could return the unit, I would not be able to get back the time spent.

I am aware that this forum is biased towards problems, as people who generally are happy with the product do not normally lurk around the forums.
As far as I can tell there is only one Mikrotik associate is lurking around (hello normis ), which suggest that the Mikrotik's support and PR departments are lacking...

Before I dish out $260+ US, I would like to see what other users experiences are like with RB4011.
I am particularly interested in RB4011 + WiFi.

There is seems to be a mixed bag of opinions about RB4011, and being a relatively expensive unit the cost of failure is fairly high. Even if I could return the unit, I would not be able to get back the time spent.

I am aware that this forum is biased towards problems, as people who generally are happy with the product do not normally lurk around the forums.
As far as I can tell there is only one Mikrotik associate is lurking around (hello normis ), which suggest that the Mikrotik's support and PR departments are lacking...

Personally I can say the RB4011 is quite reliable, I haven't experienced any problems with it

Sent from my ANE-LX2 using Tapatalk

Your poll is flawed - you ask of RB4011 with WIFI, but there is also a model without WIFI.
Most reports I have seen about stability has been with WIFI.
Personally I manage 3 RB4011's, all without WIFI. They are rock stable.

We have 3 4011’s without WLAN and one with. I’m about to buy another one with WLAN.

While they do run a bit hot, the fact is that the metal case is used as a heat sink and it gets warm. Not so hot you can’t touch it, but hotter than most users are used to.

I can’t talk about reliability over 3 months but over the last 3 months they have been fine.

If you’re having to talk yourself into getting one, then buy something else. Simply because whenever it’s a bit sunny outside you’ll always be looking at it thinking “is it going to die today?”.

We buy Ubiquiti and Mikrotik because it’s cheap compared to Aruba, Juniper, HP or Cisco. Mikrotik is very cheap relatively and the feature set is massive with a steep learning curve. I see lots of issues on here that stem from people not understanding ‘Latvian Logic’.

From the very short time I’ve been on the forums it seems that there are a few unhappy people with RB4011’s and in my opinion, Mikrotik should buy those units back and silence those critics because they’re just damaging the reputation of a good piece of equipment.

Nothing is perfect and most of the issues seemed to occur with early-adopter owners. We got ours from a Polish distributor in April and started using them in early May. The UK never gets silly-hot (record temperature here was this July at 38C) so maybe in your part of the world I could get hotter, but so far they’ve been fine for me.

Your poll is flawed - you ask of RB4011 with WIFI, but there is also a model without WIFI.
Most reports I have seen about stability has been with WIFI.
Personally I manage 3 RB4011's, all without WIFI. They are rock stable.

WIFI what makes RB4011 worth it in my opinion. As otherwise (at least on paper) it isn't great as a switch or a router. PFSense on some modern atom board will blow it out of the water as far as firewall/NAT/routing goes.


As far as mikrotik goes, I like their WiFi stuff, and the routerOS is a pleasure to work with. Yes they were a bit silly with whole Winbox thing (specifically the "Win" part), I had displeasure of borrowing a windows machine to recover a bricked device in the past. It would be great if they would have "Linbox" or simply publish the protocol they use for discovery and recovering devices so I could script something together. I digress.

I want to get RB4011+WiFi as upgrade to my hAP AC, as I found a scenario where hAP AC is struggling even with a 100Mbit/s connection.

[/quote]
....
As far as mikrotik goes, I like their WiFi stuff, and the routerOS is a pleasure to work with. Yes they were a bit silly with whole Winbox thing (specifically the "Win" part), I had displeasure of borrowing a windows machine to recover a bricked device in the past. It would be great if they would have "Linbox" or simply publish the protocol they use for discovery and recovering devices so I could script something together. I digress.

[/quote]

FYI, Winbox perfectly works on Wine (Linux/MacOS).

From the very short time I’ve been on the forums it seems that there are a few unhappy people with RB4011’s and in my opinion, Mikrotik should buy those units back and silence those critics because they’re just damaging the reputation of a good piece of equipment.

I'm happy for you. If you do not use a variety of scenarios, this does not mean that you will not have problems on which we stumbled. Before you conclude, understand the details.

PS
I am pleased with everything in Mikrotik. But to produce a raw product and finish it all year is not good.
How do you like the failure of the SFP in the stable branch? it was just wonderful.

....
As far as mikrotik goes, I like their WiFi stuff, and the routerOS is a pleasure to work with. Yes they were a bit silly with whole Winbox thing (specifically the "Win" part), I had displeasure of borrowing a windows machine to recover a bricked device in the past. It would be great if they would have "Linbox" or simply publish the protocol they use for discovery and recovering devices so I could script something together. I digress.

FYI, Winbox perfectly works on Wine (Linux/MacOS).

From about a year ago Netinstall didn't work for me, I had to borrow a windows laptop.
I am pretty sure the Netinstall is just a wrapper for a tftp server and broadcasting magic packets (some discovery protocol). All Mikrotik needs to do is to publish the spec. The spec is useless for the competition, why hide it? I might attempt to reverse engineer if I have nothing better to do.

....
As far as mikrotik goes, I like their WiFi stuff, and the routerOS is a pleasure to work with. Yes they were a bit silly with whole Winbox thing (specifically the "Win" part), I had displeasure of borrowing a windows machine to recover a bricked device in the past. It would be great if they would have "Linbox" or simply publish the protocol they use for discovery and recovering devices so I could script something together. I digress.

FYI, Winbox perfectly works on Wine (Linux/MacOS).

From about a year ago Netinstall didn't work for me, I had to borrow a windows laptop.
I am pretty sure the Netinstall is just a wrapper for a tftp server and broadcasting magic packets (some discovery protocol). All Mikrotik needs to do is to publish the spec. The spec is useless for the competition, why hide it? I might attempt to reverse engineer if I have nothing better to do.

Netinstall launched through CrossOver, not convenient, but not critical.

....
As far as mikrotik goes, I like their WiFi stuff, and the routerOS is a pleasure to work with. Yes they were a bit silly with whole Winbox thing (specifically the "Win" part), I had displeasure of borrowing a windows machine to recover a bricked device in the past. It would be great if they would have "Linbox" or simply publish the protocol they use for discovery and recovering devices so I could script something together. I digress.

[/quote]

FYI, Winbox perfectly works on Wine (Linux/MacOS).
[/quote]
No, as long as there is no decent way to scale the windows (especially text size) it is terrible. Just having to install wine to manage a router is bad. Webfig works reasonably well but Winbox on Wine is so old fashioned....

I am running RB4011/Wifi since about three months, as a result of a series of unfortunate events.*
It seemed quite attractive as an all-in-one home+homelab device.

I can confirm the "5GHz wifi dying after some days/weeks of uptime" issue exists.
But recently - after moving from 6.44.3 to 6.44.5 (which didn't fix it immediately) /and/ statically allocating frequencies - it seems fully stable for me now.
While playing with the secondary frequency setup I've managed to repeatedly crash(?) the wireless subsystem in a way that froze management layer, too (forum post), so there /are/ some gremlins in there.
But once i was done with the experiments and left it set up, wireless runs solid. Knock on wood.

Mikrotik isn't the best at the "plug it in, it just works" experience, and obviously there are some issues that need to be acknowledged - from hardware/driver incompatibilities with MT's kernel, as seen with the 5GHz wifi or with the SFP ports, to some features lagging behind the times due to home-brew implementations and inability to just drop-in the new upstream code.
There are upsides and downsides, like everywhere.

But from a "tinkerer/homelabber" perspective, I'm happy with the product. And I've seen bigger blunders and worse bugs on some of the uber-expensive Cisco gear I run in professional setting. **

It's not perfect, no. The choice of more basic RTL switch chips was quite surprising, for example. I agree it would be nice for the successor to have a more featureful switch which can be used with full hardware-vlan functionality in ROS. (which means, IIRC, the hardware must support two layers of vlans, because first layer is used internally for ROS to present the ports as independent on the CPU.)

But all in all, RB4011 is fun to play with, has a lot of features and horsepower for the price, and was a massive upgrade from my old home router. ***
Unless MT's going to jump the shark and pull some absolutely insanely stupid moves in the close future, I'm definitely going to be coming back for more hardware when time to expand comes.

* A nearby lightning strike killed the Realtek switch chip in my old OpenWRT home router, leaving the CPU and wireless functional, but with zero wired capability.
This happened just weeks after I decided to buy an EdgeRouter and retire the OpenWRT one to role of an AP.
I didn't want to fully move into the Unifi ecosystem with separate APs, having to build or buy a controller, and so on, while the independent airCube is also quite an unfinished product and focused on being controlled by a WISP.
I was also kind of frustrated with configuring EdgeOS as it's running majority off the shelf OSS components like quagga and dnsmasq but not allowing the full gamut of configuration settings to be set up via the Edge configuration/management layer.
The Unifi switches and "gateways" being Edge product equivalents with the configuration CLI removed and even narrower feature set "pushable" from the controller is also kind of frustrating.
Mikrotik on the other hand's is using mostly-custommade userland, with (near?) all the services like DHCP or routing being inhouse.
Many will consider this a bad thing - with good arguments such as long delays to implement some newer stuff like TCP OpenVPN or some newer IPv6 extensions - at least "we get access to all it can do", which kinda feels better to me.

** (Anyone remembers early IOS-XE 3.3 on Catalyst 3650/3850 series? These still suck on current code but nothing like in their early days.
Recent drama with 2960X switches having TPM fail, with the switch deeming itself a counterfeit and irreversibly erasing license files, reducing itself to nearly-unmanaged L2 mode.
AireOS 8.0 ported to the WLC-5520 platform based on Xeon rackmount server, lacking drivers for the CIMC and running fans at the max speed so you heard it outside of the server room.
All early AireOS 8.x until like 8.4 having massive wifi stability issues on old 11g clients, which's bizarre considering big business industrial settings with legacy hardware are one of top customers of Cisco wireless in the first place.
And that's just a tip of the iceberg floating in my whiskey glass...)

*** (That one's humble single core MIPS was choking itself to the point of making SSH connection take about two minutes to reach prompt when another PC in the apartment was running Steam game download on full rush.
Yes, I tried setting up QoS on it - it only made CPU melt down faster. On the RB4011, the Alpine barely sweats at 7-10% with a basic eight node queue-tree setup ensuring fair allocation and comfortable browsing speeds for everyone even with heavy downloads running. )

And for a little update, I came back home after a few weeks and 5GHz is down.
Happened at around 24 days of uptime. (Still on 6.44.5).

And for a little update, I came back home after a few weeks and 5GHz is down.
Happened at around 24 days of uptime. (Still on 6.44.5).

set frame-lifetime=10ms on wlan1. in Winbox frame-lifetime=0.01

and update to 6.46beta38.

Hi!

Is that
/interface wireless set wlan1 frame-lifetime=10
in CLI?
Because "0.01" gets rounded down to 0, while "10ms" complains about invalid characters.

Tbh not too excited about prospect running beta considering all the mess people ran into with "stable" 6.45...

Hi!

Is that
/interface wireless set wlan1 frame-lifetime=10
in CLI?
Because "0.01" gets rounded down to 0, while "10ms" complains about invalid characters.

Tbh not too excited about prospect running beta considering all the mess people ran into with "stable" 6.45...

/interface wireless set wlan1 frame-lifetime=10ms in CLI

or WinBox frame-lifetime=0.01.

about 6.46beta38 - *) wireless - fixed RX chain selection;