Mikrotik Newsletter 21

The PDF is found here.

There are several interesting things listed in the most recent newsletter…as compared to the last…heh.

The big news is that Router OS 4 is out of beta! This isn’t too surprising, since you had to use beta 4 to get 802.11N support. They are reminding you to update your bootloader and also you have 72 hours to update your license after the upgrade to V4.

It appears that V4 adds some additional switch chip functionality, as in port mirroring. All of you 150, 450, 450G, 750 owners may now rejoice, but only because I’ve given you permission.

They are still saying you can get 200Mb out of N, but I’ve yet to see it in the real world.

On to some RB750 news, and BTW I love these frickin things! It appears that if you want to order a quantity of 1000 or more they will custom print the front sticker…I’m thinking I want mine with puppy dogs and kitty cats.

KVM Virtualization. This is a hardware based virtualization optimization. I don’t pretend to know that much about this, but it looks like it is PC based and must be used with specialized Intel or AMD procs that support the technology.

New BGP implementation. Looks like they have completely rebuilt the BGP engine, which I’m happy to see. Reliablility is supposed to be up, which is great because I’ve seen several BGP bugs in the old versions.

License Structure Changing. It seems the licensing structure is changing.

In regards to RouterOS upgrades, RouterOS can be Licensed with two types of keys, L3/L4, and also L5/L6

The difference between these is that L3 and L4 only allow RouterOS upgrades until the last update of the next version. L5 and L6 however, give you the ability to use one more major version

There are also differences between all License levels (L3-L6) that are unrelated to RouterOS upgrades, see License levels

If current version would be ROS v4, L5 and L6 will work with v4.1, v4.20, v5.1, v5.20 and also v6beta to v6.99 but NOT v7

If current version is ROS v3, L5 and L6 will work with v3.1, v3.20, v4.1, v4.20 and also v5beta1 but NOT v6.0 and beyond

If current version is ROS v3, L3 and L4 will work with v3.1, v3.20, v4,1, v4.20 but NOT v5.0 and beyond

So the math is:

• L3/4 = current version + 1 = can use
• L5/6 = current version + 2 = can use

eg. L5/6 = v3 + 2 = v5.21 you can use

The licensing info can be found here.