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IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Mon Apr 19, 2021 6:55 pm
by Mike33
Please give your assessment of what is better to choose for a tunnel between two routers to combine two subnets.
IPIP vs GRE - what's the difference?

Re: IPIP vs GRE  [SOLVED]

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 12:58 am
by anav
From wiki: "GRE is the same as IPIP and EoIP which were originally developed as stateless tunnels. Which means that if the remote end of the tunnel goes down, all traffic that was routed over the tunnels will gets blackholed. To solve this problem, RouterOS have added 'keepalive' feature for GRE tunnels."

https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/IPIP
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/GRE
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/EoIP

Without much knowledge I would say IPIP and GRE are for connecting routers at different sites and EOIP is more for connecting LANS from different sites.

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 5:09 pm
by Mike33
In what cases do I need to specify addresses for both ends of the IPIP-tunnel, and in what cases it is not necessary?
I tried a IPIP-tunnel without addresses - everything works fine.

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 6:59 pm
by mhaluska
In what cases do I need to specify addresses for both ends of the IPIP-tunnel, and in what cases it is not necessary?
I tried a IPIP-tunnel without addresses - everything works fine.
Not required for single ISP or single WAN IP. If you have multi-ISP uplink or more IPs on WAN and you want to use specific one (not default), then you need to specify
local-address
. You can achieve same using static routes with multi-ISP/WAN-IP, then you can omit
local-address
.

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 8:11 pm
by CZFan
In what cases do I need to specify addresses for both ends of the IPIP-tunnel, and in what cases it is not necessary?
I tried a IPIP-tunnel without addresses - everything works fine.
When you enable IPsec encryption you will need to specify a local address

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Tue Apr 20, 2021 8:50 pm
by mkx
In what cases do I need to specify addresses for both ends of the IPIP-tunnel, and in what cases it is not necessary?
I tried a IPIP-tunnel without addresses - everything works fine.
When you enable IPsec encryption you will need to specify a local address
I just tried ... and IPsec works just fine without setting local address. Seems it automatically takes local IP address of interface used when routing towards peer. For most users that'll be interface used by default route.

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 8:50 pm
by CZFan
...
I just tried ... and IPsec works just fine without setting local address. Seems it automatically takes local IP address of interface used when routing towards peer. For most users that'll be interface used by default route.
Hmmm, Yup, just tested and seems you are correct.
I guarantee this was not the case a couple of versions ago...

Re: IPIP vs GRE

Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2021 10:28 pm
by mkx
I guarantee this was not the case a couple of versions ago...
I'll take your word on it ;-)