[SlavikCA]

About 2 years ago I tried to use Mikrotik, as the router for my ATT Fiber.

It's royal pain.

Basic router setup is not hard.

Port forward to expose web server? Can be done after heavy docs&forum reading, but hair pinning never worked for me.

I checked their WiFi AP. It's UI is hard even for senior software engineer.

In the end I got opnSense installed in VM on Proxmox and it's my router for last 2 years.

I'm using 2 Mikrotik switches with their simplified UI to operate VLANs. Zero complains.

[Jnr]

It should be doable by most software engineers. They did teach some basic CCNA course in the university as part of computer science studies and the concepts taught there should help a lot with configuring any router, including RouterOS. It could also be helpful to watch some guides on routing and firewall on Linux, since RouterOS is just Linux with a very specific UI on top.

[wink]

I dunno. I've worked with linux routers for years and I've had a lot less problems than with mikrotik.

I still like them but it's usually not the networking knowledge that trips people up.

[hack1312]

Port forwarding is a simple dstnat rule and hairpinning is just a srcnat rule.

[bombcar]

It wasn’t terribly complicated for me but I seem to be built for the old Cisco style iOS.

But with an LLM it’s easier than falling off a log and the command line means it can do everything easily.

[SlavikCA]

The router probably should work without relying on LLM:

I remember I misconfigured it, and can't really Google around or ask LLM to fix it, because my Internet is down now.

Of course I can use Internet on my phone, but it's not really convenient setup to ask LLM to troubleshoot the router.

[Jnr]

There is a safe mode built in. If you enable it and you loose connection to the router due to some misconfiguration, it will reset within 15 minutes to the point of where you started the safe mode session. Also if you mess up the IP layer, there is a chance that you can still connect and configure RouterOS through their WinBox program using the mac address.

[ssl-3]

Yeah, it's inconvenient when the [effectively] black-box router device that only the bot understands goes out to lunch, and takes access to the bot along with it.

But the degree of inconvenience is up to the beholder.

One way is using something like ChatGPT with a pocket supercomputer. It's tedious to get technical stuff done that way, but it can be accomplished. (For those who haven't tried it, the bot can be spooky-good at correctly interpreting cell phone photos of technical text on a screen. This saves a ton of transcription effort.)

Another way is with the phone's hotspot and just about any random computer. Laptops have wifi. Wifi dongles for desktops can be stupid-cheap, and it's useful to have a few scattered around. It works fine (unless one's hotspot data is ridiculously-limited, I guess).

The best way is probably by being prepared with procedural fall-back methods. Keep backups of your configs, and keep the recovery instructions with them. Test recovery; an untested backup isn't necessarily better than having no backup at all. Keep as many historical versions as one wishes, and automate it because procrastination is part of the human condition.

After that: When the router's config gets stuffed up, then the backups and the restore instructions are right there. Just pick an appropriate backup and use it.

We should probably be keeping backups of important stuff like that even in the absence of LLMs. Humans also err, and stuff does break, and what seemed obvious six months ago when we were in the groove might be impossible to remember when we need it today.

[Hikikomori]

Their products aren't really for consumers, maybe prosumers, but mainly smaller companies or ISPs that don't want to pay for Cisco.

[j45]

True, what MicroTik seems to offer is capability many orders of magnitude under the cost of comparable options.

[socalgal2]

Agreed. I tried Microtik. Seemed like it was written by DOS people from the 70s or 80s, made difficult on purpose.

I ended up switching to back to Ubiquti.

[za_creature]

They run linux and offer ssh but with a custom shell that mirrors the "web shell" in usefulness.

Ubiquiti sucks nowadays but Microtik is simply insane.

[socalgal2]

> They run linux and offer ssh but with a custom shell

That feels like DOS with short character limits etc. It's attrocious.

> Ubiquiti sucks nowadays

Actually the general consensus is that they are amazing. You're in the minority

[pshirshov]

DOS was easy.