UPnP Tutorial Now Completed

UPnP is helpful in certain situations where you need a device to poke holes in your firewall for particular services, the most common usage of UPnP in MikroTik is for online gamers who want to achieve an open NAT type for their XBOX One’s, PS4’s and other applicable gaming consoles. Some CCTV systems do offer usage of UPnP for remote viewing. UPnP is seen as a bit of a security flaw because it allows devices to poke their own holes, if a device becomes compromised it could open your network up to a lot of nasty stuff from the web, you should only really use it as a temporary measure whilst you employ a good port forwarding structure or where port forwarding is not possible.

Both written and video tutorials are now written for adding UPnP to your router using MikroTik RouterOS. UPnP is a nice easy one to do but should only be used if you absolutely can’t forward the relevant ports.

Written tutorial can be found here

Video can be found here

MikroTik Hairpin NAT With Dynamic WAN IP Tutorial Update

I’ve had my YouTube video out there for a while now (link) and whilst it does get a fair amount of traffic I have always wanted to follow it up with something written as well.

I’ve now just added in a full written tutorial of how to achieve this by using my easy to use drag and drop .rsc file. Head over to the MikroTik section to see more or for a direct link go here

MikroTik WAP60G Wireless Wire – The Best You’ll Never Use!

wirelesswire

OK so maybe I was a little harsh in the title, but to be honest. It’s quite true for the UK right now.

MikroTiks wireless wire truly is a groundbreaking product, Gigabit full duplex link over wireless at a total retail cost of less than £200 but if something sounds to good to be true, it usually is. The form factor of these units following the WAP build is great, small, versatile and outdoor grade, they feel so well made with a good weight to them. The box comes presented well and they have a nearly premium feel when you are opening the package (something which normally eludes even the expensive MikroTik products). Out of the box they follow MikroTiks normal IP convention of being on 192.168.88.0/24 space and are addressed and fully secured from the off, you can literally connect them and start passing traffic over them. So I did.

Performance was just as good as expected, with the units in very close proximity (probably a little too close) they were quite capable of maintaining a +800Mb speed test although that was using the built in bandwidth tester which is quite notorious for not being as efficient as it could be. Single duplex tests were slightly better as expected and when the connection was limited to “only” 500Mb either direction latency was measured at <1ms. At full tilt the latency did get a little wobbly but again I’m more along the lines of thinking this was the CPU’s in the devices that the actual link limitations.

tik60g2

So why won’t we be using this?

Unfortunately for our country whilst the use of the 60Ghz frequencies mentioned is license exempt, there are stipulations you need to adhere to, this one falls over in that whilst MikroTik haven’t officially released the specs, it is speculated the antenna gain in them is around 13dB which falls short of OFCOMs guideline stating that you need to use a minimum of 30dB to legally use the 60Ghz spectrum outdoors (page 2 if you’re interested). For the time being this means that this amazing wireless wire product is indoor use only.

There is a company though in Poland who are currently developing some larger antenna for them http://siec.multimediahd.pl/

So whilst the Gigabit full duplex low latency low price link is something we certainly want to see more of, you won’t be seeing one mounted externally anywhere near you any time soon (well not legally anyway).

MikroTik website product link here