Category Archives: software

Scriptlet: Bulk VPN connections on MikroTik with connection rate limiting

During my day job we use some MikroTik CHR deployments for (among other things) VPN session termination. The CHR’s are easy to spin up, offer a wide variety of VPN types, and for low traffic sessions can support upwards of 10,000 sessions on a single device.

It’s over 9000!

In the event of an outage though, you would run into a problem – those 10,000 sessions all want to re-establish at once.. and the CPU on the MikroTik quickly bottlenecks until it becomes unable to cope and begins to drop connections quickly becoming a vicious cycle.

We initially dealt with this by defining a hard limit on the number of new sessions per second, using 2 simple firewall rules and the connection limit classifier to keep these under 10 per second – however this meant that after an outage it would take at absolute minimum, over 15 minutes for all the sessions to come back online! So we came up with a better solution. Continue reading Scriptlet: Bulk VPN connections on MikroTik with connection rate limiting

Crosspost from Pebkac.io – MikroTik CHR in Microsoft Azure (ARM)

This post originally from Pebkac.io and reproduced with permission.

At the time of writing, Mikrotik’s current CHR build is 6.35rc49.

While purported to work in a Hyper-V VM, there are no instructions I could find to get one up and running in Microsoft Azure (with ARM).

Knowing that it should be theoretically possible, given Azure utilises a hypervisor with the same origins as Hyper-V, I went down the rabbit hole. Continue reading Crosspost from Pebkac.io – MikroTik CHR in Microsoft Azure (ARM)

CRS Basic Vlan Configuration

I’ve been playing around with v6.13rc12 over the last week on a CRS125-24G-1S and have put together a an example script for provisioning the unit with a user-vlan and an admin-vlan that are trunked back via the SFP port.

I’ve been waiting for a long time to have a usable and readable switch chip config on the CRS platform, so I hope this is useful for some of you guys too.

CRS125-24G-1S-RM

Continue reading CRS Basic Vlan Configuration

The Mother of all QoS Trees – v6.0

Contained in this post is a free copy of my 2013 QoS tree (compatible with v6.0) for anyone to do what they want with, I only ask that if you republish this you include a link to this post.

It is intended to work on a per-interface basis; with you specifying the WAN interface and the speed limit it is to have. You can then use simple-queues for your internal users for a full double-qos solution.

Continue reading The Mother of all QoS Trees – v6.0