[SPAM]RE: [SPAM]RE: Mikrotik Cloud Core Router and BGP real life experiences?

[rs at seastrom.com (Rob Seastrom)]

"Dennis Burgess" <dmburgess at linktechs.net> writes:

> Mikrotik really relies on its list of consultants and trainers,
> these are all outside companies, yes such as mine, that provide the
> higher class of "support" than MikroTik own e-mail. .  While their
> e-mail does have a lack of responsiveness, I was told the volume
> that they do get form other parts of the world, not saying that's an
> excuse, but it is what it is.

This wasn't a support issue; it was bug reports.  Things such as:

* your CLI has an incomplete implementation of the Emacs key bindings
  (detailed list elided here on nanog at for brevity's sake but if you've ever
  used Mikrotik kit and are a seasoned CLI user on C and J platforms
  you know what I'm talking about); please consider fixing or adopting
  libcli, gnu readline, or somesuch in future releases.

* your GRE implementation always has a protocol type of 0x0800 in the
  GRE header even when it is forwarding an IPv6 packet (packet dumps
  attached).

* ssh sessions crash when ServerAliveInterval SSH application layer
  keepalives kick off.  See http://www.openssh.org/faq.html section
  2.12 or http://www.kehlet.cx/articles/129.html To replicate: ssh -o
  ServerAliveInterval=120 admin at myrouter (to their credit this was
  eventually fixed in 5.x - this behavior was observed in 5.0rc4)

* /ping and /tool/traceroute fail for a DNS name for which there is
  no A record, only an AAAA record (although both commands will
  accept an IPv6 address as digits).  This is still a problem today.

* When trying to remove files, it seems that they are not removed by
  number, but rather by name, despite what the online help says.

There was more stuff along those lines.  "Thanks for the bug reports;
I made sure to open tickets for them but we can't commit to when or if
they'll get addressed due to competing priorities but they've
absolutely been documented" would have been a fine reply; I completely
understand the Real World considerations involved and that my
priorities were not necessarily their priorities.  Unfortunately the
return email left me with the impression that nobody cared and that
they were not equipped to handle issues brought to their attention by
people with field experience, hence the unfavorable parallels to the
"big guys".

Note that this has not kept my from speccing their kit when the task
calls for something that's surprisingly good considering how
inexpensive it is!  So maybe from a business perspective they were
entirely correct to blow me off - at least where it comes to "revenue
attributable to Rob Seastrom", the negative impact has been nil.

-r