Blogs
Pros and Cons of Overloading a Subnet to increase the efficiency of IP use in an ISP network and my implementation
Pros and Cons of Overloading a Subnet to increase the efficiency of IP use in an ISP network and my implementation. So this blog post is based off of some work that I did for one of my customers implementing https://web.archive.org/web/20210115215112/http://66.250.49.4/image/jimm/NewISP-IPV4conceptV1.1.pdf (Note, the original document doesn’t seem to be accessible anymore). This is a concept that I guess has been around the internet for a while, but I have not seen implemented at scale before. (For good reasons)
July 1, 2024
Mikrotik RouterOS v6 vs v7 BGP notes.
I will give a bit of a summary of the differences between Mikrotik’s RouterOS v6 and v7 BGP setup and configuration. This is not supposed to be exhaustive, my knowledge isn’t. I just am wanting to aggregate some info so I can direct people to it. If people want to help me out with some of the missing information I would be more then grateful. Note, all of my examples of RouterOS will be from 6.48.1(v6) and 7.1(v7) since that’s what I am running on my home router. Yes, I run BGP on my home router.
December 23, 2021
Mikrotik Cake notes:
These are my notes from implementing, CAKE in my network. I will be doing some updating to this page. Anything you find here should be taken with a grain of salt and verified with your own testing. I am NOT an expert. fq_codel FYI, if you just want to do fq_codel, it seems that a default simple queue is fine. Until some more questions are answered about CAKE and proper setup, I would recommend just going this route.
December 23, 2021
Mikrotik getting started with BGP in v7, quickly.
Mikrotik’s documentation got you turned around again? Well here is a short quick and dirty config guide and some quick tips. Forget most of what you remember from v6, and the cheats you had there. Mikrotik has changed a lot of stuff and there’s not nearly as many nice little tricks available to us anymore. If you can, the simplest option is to take your known working config in RouterOS v6 and do a straight upgrade to v7. There still might be problems, but it’s simpler then trying to learn all of the new features of v7 BGP. Unfortunately, I have seen multiple configs that won’t transition, not sure why, but either the route filters won’t come through or the entire BGP and route filters will not be transitioned. That said, if you don’t have a known working config or you enjoy the struggle here’s what I have to offer.
December 10, 2021
Running Winbox from a URL
Ever wanted to have a button on a web page that would open up Winbox to a certain router/switch in your network? Have you realized that Mikrotik’s Winbox, while it can be invoked from a command line, Mikrotik can’t be bothered to add in support for URLs? https://github.com/Lost-Creek-Technology/winboxcommand Well, that’s where I was last week, we were implementing a network documentation system (Netbox) and realized we really wanted to have a button that would launch Winbox. We already had the Username and Password as well as the loopback/management interface for most of our equipment. Why not have a button that would do the hard work for us?
March 1, 2021
The Brothers WISP Podcast 121
I had the opportunity to join Greg, Mike and Andrew for several interesting topics, from Mikrotik RouterOS v7 to Moving into Data Centers for the first time. http://thebrotherswisp.com/index.php/the-brothers-wisp-121-mikrotik-corrections-nas-hds-datacenter-newbie-guide/
October 11, 2020
The Brothers WISP Podcast 120
I had the pleasure to be a guest on The Brothers WISP Podcast. This week we talked about a lot of different topics, some new Mikrotik Hardware and my workplace terrorism. We also talked about words of wisdom for people getting into networking/IT and taking care of yourself. https://thebrotherswisp.com/index.php/the-brothers-wisp-120-mikrotik-updates-time-off-in-it-one-tip-for-students-heading-into-it/
September 27, 2020
The Brothers WISP - Episode 119
I had the pleasure to be a guest on The Brothers WISP Podcast. I also got to talk about one of my recent network management mistakes… https://thebrotherswisp.com/episode/the-brothers-wisp-119-1800-ptz-100-slas-centurylink-split
September 13, 2020
Port Forwarding to Uncooperative Hosts
NAT is not a good thing, but it is frequently a necessity. Here are some of my quick tips to diagnosing the problems and some duct tape solutions with Mikrotik routers. This last week I ran into a somewhat interesting problem and I figured it might be helpful for people for their own diagnostics. The company has a half dozen monitoring devices that they want to monitor from remote locations. These devices all require you to “pull” the data (which means that some app or service needs to log into the device and get the data) so each device needs to have a port forwarded to it from the router.
May 2, 2020
Going from Static Routing to Dynamic routing from Edge to Towers. (Part 2)
In My last post I went over the issues I was facing and the first steps I took to implement BGP to my upstreams. In this post I will look more at the internal issues I was seeing and the decisions I made to handle them. Game plan: Network Isolation, Vlans. Routing Protocol, eBGP: First off, there are many different ways to skin this cat of dynamic routing. Many people would point to OSPF as a solution, MPLS or some other system that gives you similar end products with better results because of one thing or another. I am not recommending my solution to other people, I am merely documenting my thought processes and the issues involved with switching over your network. The way I am running BGP isn’t ideal for many networks, OSPF was my initial choice, but because of restrictions in my abilities, my networking hardware and the time frame I was working with I decided to go this route. So, have mercy in your considerations I don’t even have a degree in this stuff and I am working with what I have.
April 24, 2020