MikroTik Rebranding To SoJanky

What the hell happened to this operating system?

I first laid hands on a MikroTik system in 2001 in the form of a ISO image burned to CD and installed on some random 486 intel PC I had lurking. I’d finished my Cisco Network & Design Professional ratings the year before and, after about fifteen minutes of cursing, the MikroTik interface started doing what I wanted, instead of what I had been telling it.

All was fine … until I stepped on my trusty RB941, breaking its power connector.

And the horror since then has been endless.

Attention Conservation Notice:

I may just be a crabby old man in the clammy clutches of caffeine withdrawal. And yet every other command line system I’ve been using for half of my adult life still more or less works as I remember.

Soekris:

This is what MikroTik gear looked like at the dawn of time. That’s a Soekris 4521 single board computer. It’s roughly a 486/25 class machine, it has two PCMCIA slots for wireless cards, the blue thing with the 128 is the compact flash storage, and the white thing with clips that look like a DIMM slot is actually for a hardware cryptographic accelerator. We’d use one wireless card for backhaul and the other for the local network.

And this was the first long distance link I ever installed - from the roof of the old 1st National Bank building, to a windmill in the middle of a soybean field outside Pacific Junction, Iowa. The second radio was not a cell, it was the next hop to get to a radio tower overlooking the city of Glenwood.

And this was after we upgraded to facilities on the roof of the Woodmen building. That’s a four foot 2400MHz RadioWaves antenna on the frame behind me. This was long ago and from memory … it might have had an Adtran Tracer dual DS1 bridge after we removed the MikroTik. There was a dual band 5.2/5.7 GHz link for ethernet bridging that replaced the little Soekris machines. Those were the days …

RB941:

I’ve always had some sort of MikroTik gear lurking since then, a trusty RB941 that lasted eight years before I stepped on it in the fall of 2024. It was just being used for testing so I went without, but then I started getting radio stuff to do, and had to bring in another one.

The Knot LR9 was the beginning of my displeasure with MikroTik. The machine simply would not work, configuration was impossible. I contacted support and learned there was a faulty OS. The replacement never arrived and I eventually asked for and received a refund.

My current woes involve the new RB941, same familiar hardware, but what the hell happened to this OS? I have spent more time messing with this thing than I did with the dramatically more complex Soekris installs back in the day, and it’s still not doing what I want.

I’d never really touched the web interface prior to getting this system. I want to photoshop a tab in here that says “Space Shuttle Launch”. MikroTik has enterprise features, that’s what I like it, but having it all appear at once in the first web interface when you just want to get a basic wifi router going? It’s excessive.

And here’s the real pain point - used to be you could just grab an old config, paste it into a terminal window, and your new machine would do what your old one did.

WHICH IS NO LONGER POSSIBLE

I’m going through this crap line by line, using ChatGPT to refresh me on certain obscure settings, and it’s still just … I am disappoint.

Lt-AP:

This is the other piece of MikroTik equipment that’s annoying tf out of me. I was quivering with anticipation when I opened this box. Look at that actual DB-9 console port. JUST LOOK AT IT! If there’s anything that inspires confidence in a service provider network engineer, its a piece of kit with a proper console.

I got four or six hours into trying to use the wifi interface as the net connection, while treating the ethernet as the private side of the network. The goal was picking up wifi on a pole, and dropping an ethernet line into a place with poor reception. Now the goal is merely getting it to do something useful, before I give in to the urge to borrow my housemate’s jeep in order to drive back and forth over it a couple times. This machine is showing every sign of wanting a big knobby tire encounter.

Starting with a REAL LIVE CONSOLE I expected to be able to fairly quickly switcharoo the inside and outside interfaces. Turns out it’s not quite as complex as human gender transition, but it jacked up my cortisol levels to the point where I threw it in a box and found other ways to spend my time.

External Insults:

One of the reasons to keep MikroTik gear is that you can get sflow accounting data out of them. I first did thing like this with Cisco 72xx, FreeBSD 4.x, and CAIDA’s Netflow tool. Then there were years when MangeEngine’s netflow software did the trick. I went looking for ME’s latest stuff a year or so ago and I don’t recall precisely what happened, you can’t really run over software with an SUV, but I distinctly recall wanting to choose violence.

I figured I better check before skewering ME alongside MikroTik, but the new NetFlow Analyzer page just gave me a binary without jumping through a bunch of hoops. Assuming there aren’t a bunch of plastic fragments and twisted aluminum in the driveway come sunrise, I will have a go at putting this to work again as well.

Conclusion:

I just don’t get why this has become SO HECKIN’ HARD. Linux and Cisco IOS just shoots right out of my fingers, and MikroTik did too, once upon a time.

Maybe I should get a Monster Lo-Carb, drink a third of it, and leave the rest for Sunday/Monday …