alt Hacker NewsFor me, the era of MikroTik is sort of... now.
Don't get me wrong, they make powerful and feature-complete stuff, but their UI sort of assumes you really know what you're doing. I don't know what I'm doing.
But my LLM does. I've been able to set up site-to-site VPNs with Mikrotik in fifteen minutes now, rather than the day-long exercise of googling and praying.
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LLMs certainly help out - in my case, agent helped with searching through various web forums about how my ISP authenticates and sets up Internet connection.
Nevertheless let's give MikroTik, where it's due:
* new documentation page is much cleaner to browse
* tutorials on their YouTube channel are quite informative
* WinBox v4 has in my opinion much more pleasent UX/UI than v3
> I don't know what I'm doing.
That's also my problem. My colleague tells me that it's very easy to setup, but he's a network engineer and knows what things are.
Mikrotik seems to operate in an interesting area between high-end home-labing and the SME market. Without preexisting networking knowledge at a certain level, their documentation isn't all that helpful. I'm sure you can learn from the documentation, YouTube videos and trial and error, but if like me you get a few hours once in a while to take down your home network and get it back up it's going to take a while to gain the required knowledge. I really want an addition internet connection so I can play with this stuff.
On the negative, I'd say it's pretty clear that Mikrotik want you do buy training. It feels like some information is withheld by those with the certifications and Mikrotik and the UI isn't helping you much to figure out stuff on your own.
Mikrotik makes great hardware that shines under Openvrt )
Plus the routeros supports exporting all settings directly as text file. so you can really export the whole system, send it to llm and ask it to edit. install the new rule.
in worst case you just install the old rule back if it fuck up, no really damage can happen.
Shameless plug - a blog post re: LLMs and Mikrotiks from days ago! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927915
I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.
It’s been great for llm + cli usage on mikrotik
Related they let you download the entire documentation in an LLM friendly format.
https://manual.mikrotik.com/llms-full.txt
Their front page documentation specifically mentions it: https://manual.mikrotik.com/docs/introduction#machine-readab...