Comment by chrisandchris
2 days ago
What do you use the for routing?
I tried a Mikrotik router recently but conoared to the Ubi devices, configuration feels so clunky and complicated.
2 days ago
What do you use the for routing?
I tried a Mikrotik router recently but conoared to the Ubi devices, configuration feels so clunky and complicated.
RouterOS does feel a little clunky for sure, but you can configure _everything_. And once it's set up, it works beautifully and consistently.
Ubiquiti's routers to me just seem to be prosumer routers with an "enterprise" UI on top. Whereas Mikrotik genuinely offer an enterprise experience (also still great for home) with the boring, drab, absurdly functional UI to back it up.
Ubiquiti looks beautiful; but you can't do anything with it.
True, but kinda my point (as sibling said): I don't need everything. Some NAT, some DHCP, some Firewall. And Ubi is easily enough for everything.
Mikrotik is like Linux and Ubiquiti is like Mac
I have a bit of a soft spot for Mikrotik, but I can't help feel like their hardware only exists to sell training.
For our house I tried a Mikrotik, a TP Link and a Ubiquiti AP. The only one that really works in our case is the Ubiquiti. Also for a home that's mostly Apple hardware, you kinda need a manage wifi solution, because Apples WIFI stack have issues switching between APs and needs a controller to kick you off (I don't know if that's still the case). Ubiquiti have one of the only routers that will force Apple hardware to switch APs. Mikrotiks CAPsMAN isn't even really a WIFI/AP controller, it's just provisioning.
For all it's flaws, I still really want to just run 100% Mikrotik gear.
RouterOS 7 with the wifiwave2 package supposedly improves on this by (finally) supporting 802.11r/k/v for roaming between APs.
I don't have any mikrotik hardware new enough to support it so I haven't tried it myself yet and documentation is (as usual) pretty lacking, but like you I want to believe.
The GL.iNet Flint 2 came highly recommended (near cult following) from my own pretty extensive research for offboarding ubiquity. It comes with a OpenWRT fork pre-installed, but flashing mainline OpenWRT is officially supported. I've been happy so far.
The Flint 3 just launched, and the headline feature is WiFi 7: that should be less of an issue if you're going with separate APs.
Agreed, Mikrotik's configuration is sufficiently different from just about anything else that it takes some significant getting used to.
Admittedly it's still not as awkward/bad as Draytek.
Honestly my router for the last 10 years is an openbsd box + pf rules for routing, dhcpd and dnscrypt_proxy...
I have an ansible playbook that creates the image and I run it on a cheap fanless x86 box....