RouterOS tips

RouterOS is the operating system that runs on MikroTik devices such as the OmniTIK 5 PoE ac and the SXTsq 5 ac.

You should really read the official RouterOS manual. This guide is intended to provide task-oriented entry points into the official documentation, especially when the examples in that documentation aren't fully clear.

Export the configuration

Router OS has a configuration management system that allows exporting and importing configuration.

To export the entire configuration, first connect to the console using SSH or the console screen within Winbox.

Then, run the following is command. You might want to replace config-export.rsc with a file name that reflects the device name and date of the export, for example, tucsonmesh-52-omni-20250410.rsc:

/ export file=config-export.rsc

We use a mixture of RouterOS 6 and RouterOS 7, but mostly RouterOS 6

We use RouterOS 6 on OmniTIK devices because of difficulties with WDS. NYC Mesh may have figured this out.

We use RouterOS 7 on the CCR2004-16G-2S+ at the Tucson House supernode because RouterOS 7 has support for Wireguard.

Here is the official documentation for migrating from RouterOS 6 to 7.

OSPF network type behavior

One consequential difference between ROS 6 and 7 is that the ptmp OSPF network type in ROS 6 behaves like the ptmp-broadcast network type in ROS 7.

From the documentation:

For PTMP networks that do support broadcast, a hybrid type named "ptmp-broadcast" can be used. This network type uses multicast Hellos to discover neighbors automatically and detect bidirectional communication between neighbors. After neighbor detection "ptmp-broacast" sends unicast packets directly to the discovered neighbors. This mode is compatible with the RouterOS v6 "ptmp" type.