I think that the real issue is that (this is not only on this forum, it is common enough) there is a lack of understandable (for the newbies[1]) explanations about the way things work (or fail to work), and - even when they exist - they are in crumbles here and there on several unconnected threads, so that putting them together is extremely difficult.I think the key lesson here is what you said: not that many people know about VRFs and how to use it, hence the many responses asking you to change the IP addresses.
The official help/wiki is among the worst documentation I have ever seen[2] , the forum is essentially on the shoulder of a handful of (knowledgeable/expert) volunteers that - while providing lots of good information - tend to be either very cryptic in their explanations (if any) or manage to spread the info all over the board, with topics that slowly (but surely) go astray.
Only as an example, I was looking for a failover method (it seems like as said before there are 2, 3 or more different possible methods to do anything in Mikrotik) and found the (supposedly complete/reproducible/tutoring) one by Chupaka here:
viewtopic.php?t=157048
that starts with a configuration needing either mangle or routing rules to assign routing marks (while completely failing to provide the actual rules) then - slowly - (but seemingly without an actual explanation) it turns into a completely different method with no routing marks (thus easier) but that is not explained, and this is brought forward through (seemingly partial) snippets of configuration, then at a certain point there is this:
viewtopic.php?t=157048#p941360
which brings us to this example by rextended:
viewtopic.php?p=963933#p963933
(which BTW is on a thread titled "WAN Load Balancing between 2 ISPs - one with CGNAT and another in bridge mode (real IPV4 address) ", in practice no way to find it with common searching)
that looks nice and simple but that I cannot understand at all how it works (if it works).
On the thread there are a couple similar ones by anav (as well without a real explanation and some are also in a dubitative form.
So I will have to reproduce those setups in GNS3, test if the whole stuff is actually working, see if I can understand how it works, then try to adapt it to the VRF solution.
The method Filo posted a link to earlier on this thread:
viewtopic.php?t=198999
is seemingly simpler AND it is explained (but on the other hand needs to be translated back to actual commands) though I am struggling to understand how it can be extended from dual to triple failover.
Doing "random" tests in order to be able to use the latter (Filo's) method in a triple failover, I tried using (again) two routers in cascade, each doing dual failover (router0 with ISP1 connected to ether1/vrf1 and ISP2 connected to ether2/vrf2 and BEFORE it a router1 with router0 connected to ether1/vrf1 and "last resort" ISP3/LTE connected to ether2/vrf2).
I was surprised (not really, Murphy's Laws are a thing) that it didn't work as expected, in the sense that what I thought was a "transparent" router seems to be not-so-transparent and I had to use a different subnet between the routers to have the setup (almost) working.
As soon as I wiil have time to do more tests I will post this (yet another) configuration in a reproducible form.
The whole stuff is a real PITA, but on the other hand it is actually fun
, so it is not wasted time, it is a (still in my perverted mind) a form of entertainment.[1] but then if everyone was an expert in the matter and knew everything the forum would probably have no reason to exist
[2] typically a page on the wiki lists 25 possible commands/options, half of which self-referencing, then provides 1 or 2 (incomplete) examples making use of just one or two of the 25 listed commands/options
Statistics: Posted by jaclaz — Tue Dec 12, 2023 1:00 pm