Competency Evaluation - Advice on diving into RouterOS/MikroTik from Housewife Networking

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Allan74

Member
May 15, 2019
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I have an opportunity to pickup a reasonably priced CRS210-8G-2S+IN and am wondering if I am jumping needlessly into the deep end and perhaps not preparing myself for a steeper-than-I-am-interested-in Learning curve. Although an end of life product, it still is appealing to me and can still receive software stack updates.

My competency goes as far as 100% GUI, never a CMD Line. I have never met a consumer-grade router/firewall that has bested me and have even used DD-WRT on many of my devices.

Is the fight (learning experience) to configure worth the 2x 10G SFP+ and 8x 1Gbe ports ? This is just for a small home setup, mostly media, shared outside with family over VPN (Plex setup). This would make a nice addition in my rack, to feed my Netgear MS510TX Multi-Gig Switch via SFP+ uplink.

OR, is RouterOS easier to administer/setup than I have been led to believe ?.

thanks in advance,
Allan
 

pod

New Member
Mar 31, 2020
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I personally regard Mikrotik gui and command line as more annoying(particularly switchOS) than difficult. Some features are only available from command line but it is somewhat unlikely that you will need them in your situation. What keeps me coming back is the typically very low power use. So far I have not had any serious problems but none of my switchgear from them is 10G. Yet.

It's going to be up to you but I'd say using the router gui should not leave you at sea.
 
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TS440

New Member
May 6, 2019
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Very interested in this as well. I'm considering a Mikrotik 10G switch, but have read so many negative things regarding the interface that I can't seem to pull the trigger. :)
 

pod

New Member
Mar 31, 2020
15
7
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The Mikrotik wiki can help give some idea of the software and web interface in the webfig section. Given the price of these if you decide you don't like it you can probably quickly sell it off.

For myself I still prefer console command line. It just always works.