Big fan of Tambo and what the team has built. Started using it on a couple side projects and being able to use the zod schemas as source of truth for llm structured outputs is handy.
Anyone using Mikrotik these days? Been Mikro-curious for awhile and always see them thrown around as a Unifi alternative. Yet to hear of any firsthand implementations though.
As a network engineer, I've considered them for my house, the price is right, but:
1) Their main push seems to use a thick client for admin which is a big no to me, otherwise the web ui in theory looks ok-ish.
2) Looking at their cli guide, it was cryptic as hell to me, and I deal with everything from cisco, arista, aruba, juniper, fortinet, pan, whatever from a cli or gui.
This was mostly confirmed a few weeks back, another old network engineer friend of mine hit me up asking if I've ever dealt with Mikrotik, and said no, but I knew where he was going. He'd screwed with it for a day or so supposedly just trying to make some L3 vlans, and finally a day or so later told me he'd made it work, but has never dealt with anything so terrible to configure from either gui or cli after having tried both, and he's another 20yr+ network engineer like me I trust not to be stupid.
That was all I needed to hear for future consideration.
Mikrotik has had WinBox for as long as they've been around and there's a lot of inertia around using it, but WebFig and the CLI are the only things I use (though I do have The Dude running through Crossover because it's useful).
Where you run into problems with 'tik gear is the differences that L3HW acceleration introduced into the mix. They didn't do what every other switch vendor does and limit features to what the switch chip supports and hide everything that the CPU can't handle away, so you have multiple ways of approaching most issues which threw me for a look as somebody who had been running JunOS gear in his lab for a while.
Once you get a feel for it then it's pretty straightforward to work with everything, though somebody used to an older generation of NOS like classic IOS (and associated clones) would have an easier time than me.
For sure, VLAN config is one of the most extremely "How and why did anyone end up designing it this way?" thought-inducing areas of Mikrotik config.
But I will say that the boxes of theirs that I bought about ten years ago are still going strong, never had a device fail on me, still receiving OS updates, still able to export and re-import my config to any of a wide variety of newer devices when the time comes.
Clearly they're not the right choice for everybody, but there are certainly up sides, if you're willing to grapple with the config.
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