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LLM Networking with MikroTik

blog.greg.technology

51–60 of 61 posts

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#51
post #9

It’s interesting to observe and build LLM-driven solutions in Networking. The biggest challenges that most of us networking people have are around velocity (how fast we can build and scale networks) and how effectively we can operate them (avoid defects, fix them fast when something breaks). LLMs are great in both areas. AI helps with deployment challenges by speeding up tooling development and the creation of workfl…

>LLMs are great in both areas. Nuance. LLMs are just going to report that they cant SSH to an endpoint, after delivering your vibeconfig, and throw it back to you to resolve connectivity. Your velocity with LLMs will stall at break fix every time. >AI makes AMAZINGLY good network operations triage agents, since they are able to immediately process so many signals. I have seen a lot of tokens spent on solutions that c…

I'm a network engineer at a F500 and am no stranger to automation. We use a lot of Ansible and Terraform to manage both on-prem and AWS network infrastructure. Lots of Juniper and Cloudflare products, and we use NetCM, Netbox, Prometheus, and Grafana. But we've been playing with agents since late 2024, and our team has come a long way since then.

It was already easy enough and straightforward to deploy a network because we had built so many CLI tools to handle what we needed, but it still required a bit of a human touch to validate outputs and feed those to different tools. Thanks to skills with helper scripts, we're pretty close to one click deployments these days. So much of our maintenances or operations can even be handled from our phones. We can just tell an agent that there's a new version, or AMI, and we can reliably trust them to safely update the fleet from end to end without causing service disruptions. When customers need updates made, agents draft the PRs and I just review, and they deploy after I approve.

I would argue that most of what makes this possible though isn't LLMs themselves, but having invested in robust network design, consistent standards (snowflake setups or configs will cause you problems), proper observability, and detailed docs/runbooks. While I have my doubts that someone will ever be able to vibe code that knowledge and experience, you can certainly use agents to amplify an already strong engineering foundation.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#52

I've been a long-time fan of Mikrotik. I even ran an ISP on it a fair while ago. I have a couple of archived GitHub projects if they are useful to anyone: - Router OS Diff - Can diff two configs and give you the commands needed to bring the existing config up to date with the desired config. It's certainly not perfect, but a starting point of anyone needs something like this. [1] - Netbox Routeros – A netbox plugin f…

Diffs are a pain as the order of the export changes in a version by version basis

But using “export terse” is far easier to do a standard “diff”

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#53
post #40

Mikrotik also has a safe mode for testing configuration There is also a terraform provider. Not sure if there is a safe mode here. I normally test via ssh safe mode and import the changes afterwards.

Mactelnet is infinity useful, no need for terminal servers, you can bounce from your second mikrotik and reset the config no matter how screwed up your config.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#54
post #48

>One of the usual complaints about MikroTik has been its complex ui/configuration. In a sense, I don’t know if that’s true inasmuch as networking is complicated in itself Really? Its standard point and click engineer stuff. The biggest issues with Mikrotik are the features not implemented in the gui, or the way config is interpreted between versions. Also the term of hardware support, and generally flaky code in gene…

My issue with Mikrotik is that the UI puts all the complexity up front. A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed. Mikrotik doesn't do that. For example, the most common reason I want to connect to my home router is to see what devices are connected, what their IP addresses are, and perhaps make their DHCP leases static. In a good UI that sort of common activity would be fron…

>For example, the most common reason I want to connect to my home router is to see what devices are connected, what their IP addresses are, and perhaps make their DHCP leases static.

You sound like a Windows user who just found his way into Active Directory.

>in MikroTik it's buried under 3 levels of menu.

Its buried 3 levels deep in a hierarchy, the hierarchy you need to learn to operate the system. Quickset is Mikrotiks concession to "Oh wow some users at home are operating these tools". But the tools aren't aimed at home users.

>Then the default page is to create a new DHCP server - why would I want to do that? How many users run multiple DHCP servers?

Me for one haha.

>Every other home router.

Right I think this is your problem right here. "Every apple I have ever eaten I could bite through the skin" is a weird criticism of an orange.

The mikrotik gui is an abstraction of the CLI. Its really good that way so when you are recovering a mikrotik at a remote site you dont need to think too hard about where IP/DHCP Server is from the command line even if you are a gui native.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#55
post #41

>One of the usual complaints about MikroTik has been its complex ui/configuration. In a sense, I don’t know if that’s true inasmuch as networking is complicated in itself Really? Its standard point and click engineer stuff. The biggest issues with Mikrotik are the features not implemented in the gui, or the way config is interpreted between versions. Also the term of hardware support, and generally flaky code in gene…

> Really? Its standard point and click engineer stuff. Really. UI is easy. CLI is easy. But system exposes everything to you. It doesn't hide any complexity. So you need to actually know what you are doing, as happily clicking randomly won't produce any reasonable result. > Ok so just a hobbyist perspective. No need to diminish those experiences. That's how most of us got into the job. And enterprise experience ain't…

>I is easy. CLI is easy. But system exposes everything to you

Yeah like I said, ENGINEER.

>No need to diminish those experiences.

Yeah but it certainly diminishes the criticism.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#56
post #48

>One of the usual complaints about MikroTik has been its complex ui/configuration. In a sense, I don’t know if that’s true inasmuch as networking is complicated in itself Really? Its standard point and click engineer stuff. The biggest issues with Mikrotik are the features not implemented in the gui, or the way config is interpreted between versions. Also the term of hardware support, and generally flaky code in gene…

My issue with Mikrotik is that the UI puts all the complexity up front. A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed. Mikrotik doesn't do that. For example, the most common reason I want to connect to my home router is to see what devices are connected, what their IP addresses are, and perhaps make their DHCP leases static. In a good UI that sort of common activity would be fron…

Hang on still angry at this:

>A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed.

Ok so 99.99995% of all Mikrotik RouterOS devices do not end up in peoples labs.

Even the devices that are homeish in capability are mostly deployed into apartment buildings as NTD's and managed via API/Ansible not by the occupant.

The cheaper routerboards, like the 2000 series, are almost entirely eaten by Wisps.

When you configure a new RouterOS device the use case is non obvious.

It might be an edge router that needs BGP to be stood up first.

It might be a tower router that needs only OSPF, or full stack BGP/OSPF/MPLS.

Maybe its going in a data center to terminate a bunch of VPLS tunnels or VPNs.

It might be an NTD/NTU or it might be a bodgy relay.

I had a customer that would deploy small form routerboards as ethernet regenerators when doing really dodgy cabling.

You are not the target customer. Its cool and good that as a hobby you dipped your toes in. But its a very long stretch to turn around and complain that the interface isn't good enough because it doesn't hold your hand the way you would like it to. Mikrotik offers training and certification for people who cant work it out.

This is the networking version of raising a fault with the linux kernel because you don't want to compile it, you just want the exe.

And no, theres not a potential solution in Mikrotik having a separate code base for non technical people. They cant manage the code they already have. "Its coming in ROS7" was a meme for the better part of a decade. We are almost completely done with "This feature doesnt work on this CPU" which plagued them for ages.

Asking RouterOS to be more like DLink or whatever it is you are more comfortable with is insane and I hope fervently you never encounter JunOS which is the absolute godlike gold standard but will likewise not hold your hand to help you setup your DHCP config.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LLMs are great in both areas. Nuance. LLMs are just going to report that they cant SSH to an endpoint, after delivering your vibeconfig, and throw it back to you to resolve connectivity. Your velocity with LLMs will stall at break fix every time. >AI makes AMAZINGLY good network operations triage agents, since they are able to immediately process so many signals. I have seen a lot of tokens spent on solutions that c…

I'm a network engineer at a F500 and am no stranger to automation. We use a lot of Ansible and Terraform to manage both on-prem and AWS network infrastructure. Lots of Juniper and Cloudflare products, and we use NetCM, Netbox, Prometheus, and Grafana. But we've been playing with agents since late 2024, and our team has come a long way since then. It was already easy enough and straightforward to deploy a network beca…

>While I have my doubts that someone will ever be able to vibe code that knowledge and experience, you can certainly use agents to amplify an already strong engineering foundation.

Yep, I dont see any disagreement with you at all.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#58
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with Mikrotik is that the UI puts all the complexity up front. A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed. Mikrotik doesn't do that. For example, the most common reason I want to connect to my home router is to see what devices are connected, what their IP addresses are, and perhaps make their DHCP leases static. In a good UI that sort of common activity would be fron…

Hang on still angry at this: >A good UI should guide the user and reveal relevant information only as it's needed. Ok so 99.99995% of all Mikrotik RouterOS devices do not end up in peoples labs. Even the devices that are homeish in capability are mostly deployed into apartment buildings as NTD's and managed via API/Ansible not by the occupant. The cheaper routerboards, like the 2000 series, are almost entirely eaten…

> Ok so 99.99995% of all Mikrotik RouterOS devices do not end up in peoples labs.

Mikrotik make all sorts of equipment, including home routers. The hAP ax3 is shown on their homepage. It runs Router OS 7.

> Asking RouterOS to be more like DLink or whatever it is you are more comfortable with is insane

It's not insane to ask for sane defaults or UIs which hide progressive complexity. Ubiquiti manage it far better. Teltonika manage it far better.

Networking is a hugely complex and deep field. Mikrotik make equipment targeting small businesses. There's no way your average IT person understands the tradeoffs of every configuration the device can have - which is why a sensible UI which guides you into the complexity would be good.

Perhaps Mikrotik don't have the resources to do that - fair enough, that's a business decision. But it's not insane to desire a UI which encapsulates domain knowledge in a way which guides the user. That's just good UI.

The problem with UIs like Mikrotiks, which are effectively just a graphical overlay on a config file, is that they make it very easy to make a mistake. And even seasoned IT people make mistakes. And in this case, a mistake often means a security vulnerability.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#59

>One of the usual complaints about MikroTik has been its complex ui/configuration. In a sense, I don’t know if that’s true inasmuch as networking is complicated in itself Really? Its standard point and click engineer stuff. The biggest issues with Mikrotik are the features not implemented in the gui, or the way config is interpreted between versions. Also the term of hardware support, and generally flaky code in gene…

Also on the LLM + Mikrotik front: https://github.com/2GT-Media-Group-LLC/mikrotik-manager

It's an alternative webUI for Mikrotik routers, coded with LLM assistance.

Re: LLM Networking with MikroTik

#60
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What possibly could you even be talking about? Networking gear already works together due to standards.

You still would need to know how networking fundamentals and how network protocols work. Just because standards like DNS, NAT64, OSPF, ARP, etc, exist doesn't means its easy to get these things to communicate. Ubiquiti isn't exactly known for being the best in terms of standard adherence, especially with their historically week IPv6 support.

Vendor terminology is often different (tagged VLANs vs trunking, etc.) but, in general, it is close enough that an experienced person can figure it out with a bit of googling. I've built networks with Cisco, Mikrotik, Aruba/HP, custom Linux routers, and others. Mikrotik VLANs are a bit weird, for sure.

In today's world, is generally easy to get things to communicate. It's not 30 years ago and nobody is running DECnet, Appletalk, or IPX.

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