Mikrotik, STP and RSTP are outdated protocols.

Spanning tree protocol was designed 26 years ago (1985, standardised in 1990 by IEEE) when VLANs were not so popular because VoIP was not widely used.

Rapid spanning tree is from 2001, 802.1w standard by IEEE. Ten years ago.

Multiple Spanning Tree (802.1s) was an ammendment to 802.1Q 1998 edition. 13 years ago.. It was later included inside 802.1Q in 2005. (six years ago).

Today, all manageable switches are supporting Multiple spanning tree (MSTP), so that each vlan has his own STP instance.

We have old Netgear switches bought about 10 years ago, supporting MSTP.


Even if Routerboards devices are not mainly level2 switches, they do have such capabilities, with the internal hardware switch chip, and with the software bridge capability, as well as quite advanced vlan and QinQ support.

So i think that MSTP, and hardware bonding / meshing should be supported as soon as possible by Routerboards produts.


I think that Provider Backbone Bridge (Mac in Mac) is becomming more and more important for providers and should be supported as well in SMB routers, so that we can use those products as CPE devices for linking to PBB Access networks.


So please Mikrotik, make an effort to add those protocols to the Linux kernel you are using freely since years. This will profit to you and all the clients in need of low cost solutions in a world were highly priced products are more and more difficult to sell.

Without support from companies like you to developpe advanced network functions, Linux will finish his life as a Ubuntu kernel, and you will not be able to use it anymore for your futur routing products.

Thanks for your listening.

I think they are working on Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) and Shortest Path Backbone Bridging (SPBB).

802.1aq will replace MSTP with a link state protocol for shortest path bridging allowing more extensive link and node recovery.

That's would be a good news as 802.1aq was designed based on 802.1ad, 802.1ah datapaths and the 802.1ag OAM.

Hope to see 802.1ah (Mac in Mac or provider Backbone bridge) implemented at the same time, so that we can bridge at provider level without the complexity of MPLS and ATM cricuits and without risking MAC address conflicts.

802.1ag is the monitoring and management part.

whishing SPP was here!!!

Folks, how many of you in this forum read the Metro Ethernet Forums specifications ?

RouterOS could become a Carrier Ethernet Switch Router and implement Y.1731, 802.3AG, 802.3AH -- which are all layer 2 performance monitoring capabilities.

Oh well, I'm now thinking of buying a Carrier Ethernet NID and adding a Routerboard as an optional module.

F.

Did you know what RoS is ROUTER OS? For example Cisco ISR's G1 and older (not newer ISR G2, they have more advanced switch modules) with etherswitch module support only crappy old per-vlan STP! I do not think that is is enough, but MSTP is backward compatible with RSTP and STP. So in this case MT RoS is pretty good.

But it ain't doing no G.8032 ... which would be nice;)

F.