MikroTik

I paste this from "where do i start" topic:

I complete agree with confused. The RouterOs firmware it's the best in it's class and you won't find anything near around it's features.

BUT i consider the docs and support almost a NONE.
I spent more than 3 weeks just to figure out the basic stuff, and i'm not a beginer as probably confused is not as he states he had played with a competitors product before getting his hands on RouterOs.
And every time a user, or a beginner ask for a how to or a basic stuff, always get a answer that "you must know the basic, go home and do you homework" or "go and get literate" or "it's not for beginers" and such.
Read the posts and you'll find users asking for wizards or basic questions. The basic questions are usually not answered and wizards? The will tell you that MT already has it's wizards and tell you to use winbox's hotspot or dhcp, as almost saying "we don't need more wizards".

But we know as users or at least i know as user that the moment you start using a product (could be hardware or software) you'll have to spend some time to figure out and start doing the right stuff (learning curve). Whatever this learning curve is short or long (shorter would be better you spend less hours and eventually less money) depends on the software/hardware maker. It appears MT people have a hard time getting this.

I was at Dallas, MUM meeting and i remember someone asking the MT people "When MT will be the next Cisco?" and the answer was " Depends on you (users)".

I COMPLETED DISAGREE!

It depends on YOU MT guys to make not only the best firmware/hardware in it's class BUT ALSO MAKE IT SIMPLER AND EASY TO USE. You don't get this you'll be always selling to a niche market. Wanna get bigger? Make it simple!

Getting the Cisco example, take a look how many docs, how to's and books and beginer's guides are available on the web. I know you can argue that cisco cost 10 times more, but also cost you 10 time less getting used to it. And the price tag also has it's cost, meaning the Cisco routers are lot more stable.You can argue that Cisco wireless routers won't do a fraction of a MT wireless router does and would say "I AGREE" that's the reason i stick to MT, hopping tha MT will have a BROADEN maket share in the future, giving us users all the benefits this could represent.

Want a example? Try to learn about vlans, how to put then to work on a MT box, find the docs about it and try it. Then go the web and find cisco's vlan docs. MT has only a page on the vlan command, and cisco have lots of how to's and examples, so my suggestion for a begginer is reading a cisco manual before MT's, this will save you hundreds of hours.

You can argue the cisco is a trillion dollar company but i took cisco only because i remembered the cisco question at the MUM, but you can pick several other makers with similar "best in it's class" docs and support.

I also always read "read the wiki" answer, but does the wiki provide a deep explanation on the examples? Again they assume the every users is a pro. Try to copy and past dimitry's firewalling example to a router and see what happens. It won't work, it has a syntax error on the example!

This is a friendly critic, meaning that i'm a fan, i have several RouterOs running (with pain), doing things impossible to other brands, and i can say every other, since i had tried all the major wireless stuff, from cisco to zyxell with no good results in comparation to MT's.

I'll post this in 2 topics and hope this will reignite the debate on simplicity and hope MT will produce simpler easier to use products and hopping they sell like crazy meaning millions of dollars to it's investors and emploees and getting us users more hours to sleep instead trying to understand the basic.

I found the documentation helpful, and still do when I need to reference something. It isn't an easy read for someone with little to no network experience, but it gives the basic usage of commands and examples as well.

The documentation is meant to help you apply the software to accomplish your networking goal. It isn't a guide to designing and building your network. There are books out there for that, and there is mikrotik training programs out there to get you up to speed on the network aspect and mikrotik software side of things.

This complaint crops up every once and awhile, which tells me theres just a few people out there that refuse to take the time to learn a valuable tool. Mikrotik and every other piece of networking hardware/software is based off of the same RFC's. If you have a good understanding of networking, you'll have no problem using Mikrotik's software. There is a learning curve as you said, but with a foundation in networking (and some experience with operating systems) you can easily use the documentation to do anything with the product.

As I said earlier, the documentation isn't going to tell you how to build your network, step by step. There is no "one size fits all".

You can't expect to know everything about something your first time.

As for support, eh.. I agree there is a lack there (if we're talking live support via telephone). I knew that when I purchased the software, and have been on this forum asking questions from day one. Some didn't get answers and forced me to re-read the docs and try, try again. Others got quality answers. I for one appreciate the fact that the very people who build this software take time to answer questions in a public forum.

Having said that, there is always room for improvement. Be content, but never satisfied!

anyway thats my 2cents...

I did not say that the manuals are not helpful, they are for sure, but they are poorly written.
Want a examples of this? Read the manual about proxy, where does it say the differences between proxy and web-proxy? What about the new weproxy-test? You have to search the forums to learn the main differences between then and how to implement those. The new webproxy-test will work at glance with only one click on transparent-proxy hotspot option, the regular webproxy will not. Where do we get this? From the forums, not from the manual, you got to spend time here reading the posts. Wouldn't be easier to put a p.s. mark in the doc about it?

"This complaint crops up every once and awhile, which tells me theres just a few people out there that refuse to take the time to learn a valuable tool"

That's my main goal, the discussion, if crops up every once and while, others feel the same way i do, i rather be selling wireless service (and making money) than spending time reading forum posts to discover the that they forgot or did not update their manual.

"Mikrotik and every other piece of networking hardware/software is based off of the same RFC's. If you have a good understanding of networking, you'll have no problem using Mikrotik's software"

That's misleading. Every product has its unique features. Even if you know ikarus or any other linux router for example won't qualify you to use RouterOs right away. If you know cisco ios it won't qualify you to use juniper routers without hard time. So what's the difference? If you take cisco and juniper they are very well documented. My point continues to be "make simpler and well documented" with examples and wizards so others can migrate and your customers base can grow. To me it makes no sense to spend even seconds going to posts looking for something that should be in the manual.

I also appreciate when MT people, as Normis answers the forum.

I complete agree on "Having said that, there is always room for improvement. Be content, but never satisfied! "

Hi, having just deployed my first MT box and thus having just gone through the steepest part of the learning curve I have to agree with mykrosoftz comments.

Great product, basic documentation.

The forum and Wiki are great as far as they go and I certainly couldn't have done it without them but information is often really not easy to find and you can burn a lot of hours looking. Some sort of searchable knowledge base would be a huge improvement IMHO.

Despite this I am a convert

I TOTALLY AGREE! Mikrotik RouterOS seems to have a lot going for it, but good documentation is not one of their strong points.

A little of this may be lost in translation, as it appears many different languages attemp to use RouterOS.

I too just spent 3 WHOLE days of my life learning the basics and attempting to get RouterOS configured to control bandwidth on our wireless backbone. Most of the time was spent experiementing with different Queue settings, trying to accomplish the bandwidth control I was looking for. I have an EXTENSIVE networking background and have used Cisco routers for years. Is Cisco easier? NO. But the documentation for almost anything you need to accomplish is on their website and understandable!

Some time spent improving the manual and adding more examples to the documentation, especially how the different features can work together to accomplish real world task. Also document limitation on what will and won't work together. The simple queues and queue trees come to mind.

RouterOS is complicated. It is advanced. It's not for beginners. We understand! But surely your goal is not to just please the existing RouterOS experts? Don't you want to please new users and thus sell more software and have a wider user base? If you do, you should focus on usuability issues and documentation for the next version. It would make more difference then a fancy new feature that no one can figure out how to use.

It seems order of importance for RouterOS success would be:
1. Stablility - Routers MUST be stable or they are useless. Nothing is more important than this!
2. Usability - What good is it, if you can't figure out how to use it or some of it's features? There is several sections of RouterOS that could be re-written to make them much more user friendly, without changing the core way of how they work. The queues and firewall section come to mind again. Having WINBOX group Access-List and be able to organize the queues for better user queue management, etc..
3. Capability - And finally what it's capable of doing. RouterOS is already pretty capable, although I'm sure there's plenty of new features requested.

The support is poor too. I've asked several questions on this forum and got 1 response! Either no one uses the forums or the only people using the forums are the people with questions, not answers.....

Just my 2 cents worth.

Hear! Hear!

My sentiments exactly! The manual is a reference manual for someone that already knows and understands a lot of the special word usage.

However, there is little or no context about many of the concepts used in the manual; and too few examples to put a lot of it together.

It took me quite a long time to figure out the basic distinctions between the different filter/chain rules, and how they applied. Someone (not on this list) explained them to me in very clear, concise language, and suddenly this little light bulb went on in my head.

A lot of the posters/lurkers on this forum are very knowledgeable, but tend to be fairly arrogant about sharing what they have learned the hard way.

The attitude seems to sort of "I had to go through enormous pain and suffering to learn this, and by golly, you need to do it too."

(or something to that effect)

(flame off)

Thanks, I needed that.

I am also a newbie working my way through the learning curve.

The documentation is "interesting"

I frequently find the Wiki to contain the missing link between the docs (devoid of any application examples) and some actual real world application examples, and some discussion of the meaning of the various command variables, and their practical effects.

Case in point that brought me to the the forum this morning: "Limits" in Firewall Rules. From the docs at
http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/2.9/ip/filter.php

limit (integer/time{0,1},integer) - restricts packet match rate to a given limit. Usefull to reduce the amount of log messages
Count - maximum average packet rate, measured in packets per second (pps), unless followed by Time option
Time - specifies the time interval over which the packet rate is measured
Burst - number of packets to match in a burst

Perhaps something was lost in the translation from Latvian, but, there is no clue as to which variables go where in the command. Yes, some applied logic dictates that you drop them in the order given... Fortunately the wiki contains some examples, and gives some hint as to what reasonable "count", "Time" and "burst' numbers might be....

One thing that we users can do, is to post good solid information to the Wiki.... I have some ideas for good Wiki contributions that I plan to make...

Just a FYI, in relation to this, I have started working on a project to create on-line on-demand videos (screen captures) on how to do most of the basic MT features. I will be going though quite a few of the things that I have done in the past. Of course, these will not be without cost, and I expect to have some basic stuff on-line before the end of the month at http://www.wisp-consultant.com, but, figured this may be worth a shot.

I did have some questions on what these types of videos would be worth to you! Should it vary based on length, or should it be a fixed cost per video? What about purchaseing a 6 month or yearly subscription to the entire libary?

What would it be worth to you to have BETTER information? Videos to TEACH you!

Dennis

i too have been trying to figure mikrotik out and have spent at least 80 hours reading forums , doc's and the wiki. I have posted questions also and have recieved some responses. Wish it was easier to find some things. I have figured a lot out on my own and I wonder why when we post it is so hard to get answers. Is it becasue the mayor part of the forum are beginners? I think also that the Doc's should have more real exapmles and exsplanations.

gmsmstr ...Great!!! would be great for newbies or even the experienced users to learn from your videos...I tried today...04/12...but i could not get your web page. Is your web site working?
I'll keep trying...I think all mt users will thank you.

glueguy wrote

"A lot of the posters/lurkers on this forum are very knowledgeable, but tend to be fairly arrogant about sharing what they have learned the hard way.

The attitude seems to sort of "I had to go through enormous pain and suffering to learn this, and by golly, you need to do it too."


EXACTLY...That's the point !!! It's hard to learn, so even the know everything guys are not willing to share the "on deep" stuff.

My point is...If MT won't make easy or not share their secrets...Why should i?

It's not generic off course, there's a lot of helpfull users in this forum, speding hours answering questions for free. But we need more!

MT rules...but it's pain to learn how to use it.

it included the command in the link

http://www.wisp-consultant.com

Just for everyones knowledge, Butchevans.com does training for MTs all over the country, great course for anyone who wishes to attend. Also, any of these videos that I produce, a few may be free, but either they will be a pay per video or a subscription for xxx amount of time, plus it will take time to build up the video base as well.