Mikrotik

Infobox company
company_name = MikroTik
company_
company_type = Limited company
company_slogan = Routing the world
foundation = 1995
location = Riga, Latvia
industry = Networking hardware
products = Routers, Firewalls
num_employees = 70
homepage = [http://www.mikrotik.com/ www.mikrotik.com]

Mikrotīkls Ltd., known internationally as MikroTik, is a Latvian manufacturer of computer networking equipment. It sells wireless products and routers. The company was founded in 1995, with the intent to sell in the emerging wireless technology market. As of 2007, the company has more than 70 employees.

RouterOS

The main product of MikroTik is a Linux-based operating system known as MikroTik RouterOS. It lets users turn a selected PC-based machine into a software router, allowing features such as firewall rules, VPN Server and Client, bandwidth shaper QoS, wireless access point and other commonly used features for routing and connecting networks together. The operating system is licensed in escalating levels, each releasing more of the available RouterOS features as the level number rises. Licensing is fee based and escalates with the released features. There is a software called Winbox which provides a sophisticated GUI for the RouterOS operating system. The software also allows connections via FTP and telnet, and SSH shell access. There is also an API which allows creating customised applications for management and monitoring.

RouterBOARD

The RouterOS, combined with their hardware product line, known as [http://routerboard.com/ MikroTik RouterBOARD] , is marketed at small to medium sized wireless Internet service providers, typically providing broadband wireless access in remote areas.

Features

RouterOS supports many applications that can be used by medium size to large ISP, for example OSPF, BGP, VPLS/MPLS.

All in one, RouterOS is a versatile system, and is very well supported by Mikrotik, both through a forum and a [http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/MikroTik_RouterOS Wiki] providing assorted and thematic examples of configurations.

The software provides support for virtually all the network interfaces that the Linux kernel 2.6.16 supports, excepting wireless, where the Atheros and Prism are the only supported chipsets, as of 3.x version.

Criticism

* While formally, RouterOS is operating system based on Linux and Free Software, there is no any sources offered for download, although there are other ways to obtain it, as outlined in their license
* It is not possible to extend system for customers. RouterOS is not suitable for running custom task-specific applications. There is no easy options for customers to build own packages. There is no SDKs or any tools to simplify packages creation. So, customer will only have some fixed functionality pre-defined by company.Therefore, it appears to be some sort of vendor lock-in. There is lots of more customer-friendly vendors who offers SDKs and welcomes packages creation and other tasks targeted to extend and improve OS functionality.

External links

* [http://www.mikrotik.com/ Company home page]
* [http://routerboard.com/ RouterBOARD home page]
* [http://forum.mikrotik.com/ Official support forum]
* [http://wiki.mikrotik.com/ MikroTik Wiki]

References