[klowner]

I'm extremely fond of Mikrotik gear, they're capable of pretty much anything and really reasonably priced. They're out of Latvia.

The only thing is they're definitely not designed for regular consumers, you at least need familiarity with Linux networking.

[tails4e]

Their software It's incredibly powerful, but also quite opaque to someone not into hardcore networking. I setup a small private WISP using their gear and configuring it was pretty rough for a non networking nerd. It's not running Linux, but a custom OS. The quickset is handy, but as soon as you want to do something slightly different, you're up to your neck in low level config. Still great HW and if you know how it can do everything you need. Ubiquity gear has a friedlier interface.

[ssl-3]

Mikrotik gear absolutely runs Linux. It just uses a custom userland.

Ubiquity gear is structured the same way: It, too, absolutely runs Linux, and it uses a custom userland.

One of these userlands is friendlier than the other, but they're both still Linux.

It's a tale as old as the hills, or at least as old as the OG Linksys WRT54G -- which was my own first foray into owning dedicated routing hardware ~20 years ago (which was -- guess what -- Linux with a custom userland). (Previous to that, I used Linux with the userland of my choosing on my desktop PC.)

[tbrb]

The biggest life changer to me back when I worked with Mikrotik gear was learning that the '?' character was an immediate "Show me all of the commands I can get to from the current prompt", and then appending '?' to existing commands would show all of the sub commands available etc.

From that point I found the CLI to be relatively discoverable as a way to configure the devices.

[tails4e]

Makes sense. I guess the UI experience, including the terminal was so alien I assumed routerOS was an actual low level OS but, in retrospect, I was an idiot and of course it is Linux under the hood!

[ssl-3]

"Alien" works, and is shorter than descriptions like "asininely feature-complete reimplementation" are.

I like RouterOS well enough, though.

[m463]

I bought one and ran their firmware but it phoned home. kept on sending packets to some weird ip address at boot.

So I installed openwrt. They're actually pretty well supported by openwrt (except for the newer 10g switches)

[k_roy]

> kept on sending packets to some weird ip address at boot.

You mean an RFC1918 for etherboot? I have a "few" of these devices and this simply doesn't make any sense in any context.

[m463]

No it was not any kind of private ip (10.x/172.x/192.x/169.x etc). I swear it was eastern europe, probably mikrotik

I've since wiped the firmware/license keys so no idea.

[AnarchismIsCool]

I have some of their stuff and really like it. It's not fully plug and play, but it's some of the best kit on the market for tech people.

[TiredOfLife]

> The only thing is they're definitely not designed for regular consumers, you at least need familiarity with Linux networking.

Mikrotik has had quickset (a single page configuration for home use) for 8+ years, Android Home app for 3+ years

[greycol]

It's a hard problem because when you start asking questions about what an unqualified home user needs it's easy to say just one more thing.

port forwarding? ofcourse how else can the kid have a minecraft server with friends

dynamic dns? then the friends don't need to search "what's my ip" every time

parental controls? to schedule how much time they can play minecraft...

I like Mikrotik but for anyone trying to go beyond the barebones default firewall/router/ap on the quickset page you need to be prepared to learn. i.e. To make a DHCP reservation, you go through the menus until you click IP, then you realise you don't click on DHCP client to set up a DHCP client you go into DHCP server and try to give a device a reservation which requires the step of making it static first then seperately setting it's IP.

The complaint basically boils down to: they have all the options there and available and the least common task is just as easy to do as the 2nd most common (after initial basic setup), and if a task touches multiple parts of the config you need to touch each of those parts. Great for someone who knows what they're doing but for a home user it would be great to have more quickset pages for the 2nd to 10th most common tasks (as intagible as that list is).

[baq]

The one time I tried to use the quickset page was to set up an AP and it did. I was rather surprised that it didn’t configure an IP address to access the admin page afterwards…

[9x39]

I love Mikrotik too and the price point, but it's for people who know network engineering or need a particularly rare type of gear (like a small inexpensive 10G SFP switch).

I tell people to jump into Ubiquiti's (ui.com) ecosystem which is much more accessible for power users who occasionally wrestle with concepts like wireless, VLANs, subnets, and traffic rules.

[Aloha]

I just wish they had a decent controller based wifi system - if they do, its been really hard to identify from their website.