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Ireland, Dublin
1 Level
753 Review
53 Karma

Review on ๐Ÿ“ถ Mikrotik hAP ac Lite (RB952Ui-5ac2nD-TC-US): Dual-Concurrent 5GHz Wireless Access Point with 802.11ac Technology by Anthony Montgomery

Revainrating 5 out of 5

software error. the best networking products

The company's approach deserves attention. Some people can and want to build esoteric networks, and they understand that. This is who should buy Mikrotik products. People who want light coverage should probably spend more money on Ubiquity. Configuring Mikrotik is not that simple, apart from the most basic configurations. However, you can customize it for almost anything, and for some it's worth a lot. I use a wireless access point and I use this device to connect to the access point, which provides a number of wired connections to my network. It's cool and not many other devices can be configured to do it. Brilliant. (And it works perfectly.) But something much simpler doesn't work. The software in RouterOS (Microtik's consumer operating system) has a serious DHCP bug. Although I've seen this on multiple devices, it's most common on Apple clients. This does not complete the address assignment. It offers an address but quickly finds that the address was not accepted and the device is left with a self-assigned useless address. Static reservations do nothing. The only workaround is to manually set the IP address in the client, which is an absolutely terrible workaround, especially if you have a lot of clients. I've looked at many docs and blogs and it seems to be a problem for 3 years! Apparently this problem has existed since software update 2017/18 (v6.37.x?). It's unforgivable. If I were asked to set up a network for someone else I wouldn't use this equipment as you can't just set it up and forget it and if anything goes wrong a computer science degree would be too necessary. I gave my friend a TPLink router and I haven't had a single complaint or question, whereas if something goes wrong on a Mikrotik device you probably have to physically go there to find out why. Great for experts (except for the pesky DHCP server bug), and that's it. If I move from my apartment to a house I'll probably add Mikrotik equipment because I've got quite a bit of investment at the moment, but that's partly because of the expectation that the company will fix the DHCP bug.

Pros
  • Everyone likes it so far
Cons
  • Definitely a bad product