On Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:15:04 -0500, David E. Smith wrote:
WT*F*? I've never understood the appeal of Microtik, and now I
understand
it even less.
The software is... quirky, at times, but some of their hardware,
especially
on the very low-end, is hard to beat.
For instance, they make a SOHO router with five Gigabit Ethernet
ports for
$70, which has point-and-click access to MPLS, DHCP (server and
client), a
few different flavors of VPN including IPSec, and a bunch of other
stuff. It
even supports BGP, though you're not going to do very much with that
system's 32MB RAM.
If you really wanted, you could buy the hardware then re-flash it
with
something else; the CPU on this particular system is a MIPS 24K, and
there's
probably other embedded Linux/*BSD distributions that would work well
enough.
David Smith
MVN.net
I guess vendors are just not interested.
D-Link DIR-600, here in Lebanon $30. Zyxel Keenetic also similar price.
Only one problem, Mikrotik are 32Mbyte flash, and those are 8Mbyte.
My friend developing firmware for this platform (RT3050/3052, Wive-RTNL
project) and can put almost any software there, it is opensource
project.
As benefit this Ralink platform has hardware wirespeed(100Mbit) NAT
offload on RT3052, and guy able to make it work even on 3050 (even
officially it is not supported there). Technically it is possible to run
gigabit there even, but current vendors do not produce such products.
I think on cheap platforms, they have wirespeed gigabit only on
switching functions, but rest will suck. Their top products can do more,
but they are still cannot beat PC with Linux. RB1100, $400 for 150 Kpps
with NAT and 300 Kpps without, it is not that good.
The only major and important difference in "schematics" with routers
that can be reflashed is flash size and sometimes RAM. 64Mbit SPI flash
2.12$, and Mikrotik uses this days 512Mbit NAND, $7.01 . ALso they have
nice circuits for variable power, with DC-DC converter, but nothing
unusual or innovative, like Cisco or others has. Before they had some
funny circuit with Xilinx FPGA to run NOR flash over SPI.
Note: DD-WRT on RT305x suck. Their wireless support are incomplete, and
no NAT offload.
---
System administrator
Denys Fedoryshchenko
Virtual ISP S.A.L.
