Mikrotik 450G

My friend Sean recently convinced me to purchase a small appliance build by a company which has been around for quite some time : Mikrotik. What motivated me to purchase the 450G was the fact that having recently upgraded to a 30Mb service, my beloved Soekris 4801 could not cut it anymore. I saturated it at 22Mb/s.

I looked at the different boxes available around, and at about 100 quids, that routerboard appliance looked about right. Let’s be clear about this, RouterOS is by no means open. Having been exposed to JunOS and IOS, this is not really bothering me much. The appliance is however Linux based, has syntax highlighting and support some nice advanced stuff you are unlikely to need at home: OSPF, ISIS, BGP.

My appliance was delivered with RouterOS 4.11, which i decided to upgrade to 5.0rc8. Development is fairly active on the appliance. I did a quick test at work over a very fast internet line and got a speedtest of 95Mb/s sustained. That looks like it will be able to deliver for the next while 🙂

I like the fact it is fully IPv6 supported, it has advanced DHCP server capabilities, it can provide DNS for your home network, static leases, static DNS names. I am only less than a day in the process of discovering all the things I can do with it but it looks promising. My next post will be about SNMP, QOS and firewall.

Stay tuned!