MikroTik RouterOS: Enterprise Features, Beginner Price, One Real Catch

This is the Maker Tick HAP AX2. It costs $99. And for that, you get Wi-Fi 6, WireGuard, VLANs, policy routing, BGP, and more advanced configuration options than you'll find on any router at this price. No subscriptions, no force cloud registration. The license is baked right into the purchase price, and the software updates are free for the life of the device. But this video really isn't about the router. It's about router OS, the operating system inside it, which runs on almost everything Maker sells, from this $99 box all the way up to their rack mount gear that cost thousands. Every time I talk about routers and networking, a lot of you ask about Microick. So, I bought one and here's how it works. But also, here's what you should know before you buy it so you can decide if it's the right device for you. Getting started is quite easy. Plug the device in. Plug in the WAN, which is by default set to DHCP. Plug in the LAN. Head over to 192.16888.1 and you're presented with the web interface and asking for a password. The password is written on the bottom of the device, and it's also written in a booklet, which I found a little bit easier to read because it's a really small font on the bottom. Now, you don't have to use the web interface. There's actually three ways you can get into your Micro Tick. This is what Windbox looks like. Windbox is a tool you can download directly from their site and gives you a slightly different layout but very similar to the way the web interface itself works. And then we have of course the command line. This is where a lot of people seem to recommend if you want to do advanced configurations with microick where to go and matter of fact I found some things easier to do here in the command line but this is also where we start getting into things being a little bit more complicated. But let's go ahead and look at the web interface as well so we can compare the two. And if we go here to quickset, you'll see that it looks a whole lot like the quickset in Windbox. And they're one and the same. Essentially, this gives you a little bit more featurerich by using the Windbox interface, but it's so close to being the same. And as far as getting up and running goes, by default with it having WAN set to DHCP and the LAN automatically handing out addresses, it routes traffic right away. You set the password here for your Wi-Fi and away you go. There's not much else you have to do in terms of just to get it functioning and working. By default, all the firewall ports are closed. So from an external side, you're actually quite secure. But and this is where the button comes in. There's a lot of services running locally on LAN that are fully exposed. Once again, this is something easier to show from the command line. So we go here to IP services print. It lists out all the services are running. So by default, we have SSH on port 22. This is how I got into the system. We also have FTP and TNET running. So these are by default exposed not on WAN but on the LAN side. And if we want to change any of these services, we can do it via Windbox or the web interface. Either one of them will do this. We can go here to the search for the web interface, type in SRV for services and then you can find the IP services service and we'll figure out if we really want that FTP running and just uncheck it and hit okay. Now we've saved that as an option. And maybe we don't want Tnet on this either. It seems like I probably don't need that. We can apply it or hit okay. Or we can even change the settings on Tnet from there. But what if you want to do something a bit more advanced like create several different networks, create different firewall rules of what can or can't be accessed between those segments. Also, you would like to have different Wi-Fi, one maybe for IoT. So, let's talk about using an LLM. I did use Claude for this. I'm not a maker or tick expert, but this is actually where this may have more value to you is knowing that Claude seems to know it quite well. It didn't work the first time. It took a couple tries. It didn't have the bridging set up properly at first. And that all got sorted out with just a couple extra prompts. So, it didn't actually take a ton of tokens to get a base config set up. And it did it from the command line because that was the easiest and fastest way to do it. Now, the good news is if you're not wanting to just blindly chose Claude, and yes, AI certainly gets things wrong and you should always test any configurations that you get from it, you can go through the official docs. Matter of fact, they've all been revamped since I've looked at MicroTech, which has been quite a few years. So, seeing that they have much updated docs, they also have a very updated YouTube channel that offers a lot of guidance. Now, the videos are a bit long because of all these steps doing the configuration, whether you do it through the web interface or the command line. There's a lot of instructions there. There's also a few YouTube channels that I've not spent a lot of time on, but did kind of skim through, such as the network berg, who has some good videos based on the comments for setting up maker. And that's the catch. The real question is not whether router OS can do what you need. It likely can. The question is how much time do you want to spend learning it? For some of you, that time is the whole point. And that's great. For others, a good web interface that gets you to the working config in 10 minutes or less is the way to go. And there's nothing wrong with that answer either. Also, have you considered using AI to build or coach you through router rest config and setup to make the learning curve a little less steep? Let me know in the comments, especially if you're running it in production. Thanks for watching. You can find me on all the socials over at laurrensystems.com or on the forums at forums.lorsystems.com. [music] >> [music]