This is the first part of my MikroTik and Terraform series, where I will explain my old and current setup and answer a lot of questions about why.
Old setup
Many, many years ago I decided to abandon the traditional two-pair wiring hDSL (most widespread, at least in Switzerland) because I was bored of paying the electrician at each house change due to the required changes on the building telephone panel. To cut a long story short, I chose the LTE modem for its versatility, I have no need for high performance and therefore did not choose fibre optics.
I received a very poor Huawei LTE modem with almost no options and security features. I bought an Asus AX55 router, which allowed me to customise a lot of parameters and worked really well for many years.
For the past few years I have been unhappy with my setup because it requires two physical devices without all the features I was looking for.
Why
MikroTik
To be honest, my first choice of router was Ubiquiti UDR, it was almost perfect, the only feature missing was the LTE modem, which was frustrating because I still had to keep the crappy Huawei modem. The other point was the price.. really too expensive and luckily it was not available in all stores in the end. I waited many months for the UDR to come back on the market without really looking for alternatives. That was until a few weeks ago when I first saw some MikroTik routers. The brand name was not new to me, but I never looked at their products. I don’t know why, but as soon as I started reading the datasheets on the routers, I immediately felt stupid… wondering why I had never seen this manufacturer before. I started digging through the Routeros documentation, YouTube videos and blog posts around the internet and the initial feeling was really mixed, from one side it looked really complicated and so a bit scary to have the possibility to customise every possible parameter, but from the other side it was exactly what I was looking for (LTE support, firewall and VLANs, static DNS, etc). Digging further I also discovered the possibility to run containers and this opened up some interesting scenarios with CloudFlare Tunnel to investigate in the future. And finally, the icing on the cake… a Terraform provider currently in development.
Terraform
Why Terraform? Simply because I love to automate everything I do.. as soon as I found this project terraform-provider-routeros I understood that MikroTik would be my new router.
Sharing
Why share your entire router configuration with the world, exposing your home network topology? That is a really good question. I believe that sharing is caring, and this project may help someone in the community who has similar needs to mine, or who is simply interested in increasing their home security.