[alexfoo]

I had a big debate with myself whether to go Mikrotik or Unifi. Being EU based I really wanted to go Mikrotik but ended up with Unifi as I'd had more experience of it when helping out friends/neighbours.

Maybe my "last house" (i.e. the one we'll get to see us through to retirement and beyond) will be Mikrotik based. By then I'll probably want as little computing stuff as possible and will just sit in a comfy chair doing crosswords and sudoku with a pencil.

[simoncion]

If one wants to play around with the shell and other administrative tools, one can download a bootable x86 install image from [0] that works fine in qemu. I assume it'll work fine on any other major VM that can boot Linux and provide virtual NICs that work with in-tree drivers.

It's documented (but -IMO- poorly) that the default username is "admin" and the default password is the empty string. The brand-new-as-of-today docs site is at [1], the "older" docs site is at [2], and -as documented on the older docs site- you can get a PDF of the docs at [3].

If you ever find yourself with an entirely spare hour or two, fire up the VM just to play around with the interactive shell that they have built. I may not have worked with enough Enterprise Devices to have an informed opinion... but once I understood what the shell was telling me, I found its use of color to be helpful both when attempting to learn the basic syntax of the shell and as a reminder of what tokens are valid in which contexts. I've never worked with another interactive shell that has such nice syntax-and-data validity hinting.

[0] <https://mikrotik.com/download?architecture=x86>

[1] <https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/introduction>

[2] <https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/>

[3] <https://box.mikrotik.com/d/df76f0d495284eb1b6a1/>

[bombcar]

Mikrotik is "quite low level" if you want it to be (it reminds me somewhat of old Cisco IOS) but it works great.

And even if you're a bit scared of manual configurations, the web GUI and Claude understand it pretty well.

[mwpmaybe]

I use UniFi for most of my home network so It Just Works™, but I've thought about mixing in Mikrotik for e.g. the compute rack so I can play around with 100G+ links and more esoteric stuff like VXLAN.