alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 0:45 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743)
In reply to: alternatives exist by dlang
Parent article: Moglen: How Should the Free Software Movement View the Linux Foundation?

"Since routerOS is linux based, they really should be doing so. And they really should update it (the last I read it was based on the 2.6 kernel)"

There are continues updates of the routerOS and these days it's based on the Linux 3.3.5 kernel.

The source code for it is available on request but I must say I have never tested requesting it from them ( or anyone else for that matter ) so I can't say how "functional" that process is from them but indeed it should be open but I guess they are one of those vendors that think they are doing something very special in their proprietary environment which other vendors are not doing when in fact in a nutshell they are all doing the same thing.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 1:31 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

I'll take another look. About a year ago when I last looked, things were rather dismal, at least for the crs125 switch I was looking at and what I was begin told by the guy trying to get openwrt working on it.

Their "What is RouterOS" pdf still claims that it's linux 2.6 based. I don't know if I'm glad that the document is so out of date or not :-)

The Openwrt table of hardware page isn't encouraging ( https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/crs125g ) but it wouldn't be the first time a page didn't get updated after things got working.

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 9:41 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

This page is a little bit better: https://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/mikrotik/rb450g

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 15:26 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

If he's going to be playing with openwrt for fun he's probably better of just buying one of Turris ( which is based on openwrt ) devices.

1. https://omnia.turris.cz/en/

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 16:34 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link]

I should mention to readers that might have been unaware of turris and it's campaign and have a higher budget to play with than what has been previously discussed here that they have up to May 5th to get the indigo campaign specific stuff.

Once that date has passed only products intended for future retail sale will remain available [1].

Note this is completely open project on a completely open hardware ( as it can be ) and people will be able to replace the turris openwrt with their own distribution if they so much want ( which alot of people will do including myself ) in fact the cz.nic guys already have given Andreas Färber ( suse/arm ) one of their prototype to experiment with to do just that and Andreas has already gotten opensuse running on it and shared the instruction how he did so with the opensuse community here [4] ( which should be enough to get other distribution and people started ).

Here are some couple of other links readers might find useful [3][4].

1. http://en.blog.nic.cz/2016/04/27/turris-omnia-campaign-en...
2. https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-arm/2016-03/msg00136....
3. https://github.com/CZ-NIC
4. https://www.turris.cz/en/

alternatives exist

Posted Apr 28, 2016 17:48 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

I've got one on order.

I do a bit more than just playing with it for fun. I run the wireless network at the Scale conference, this year I deployed about 120 APs around the convention center.