Yawn

I know. Everybody and everybot posts what is their 'homelab essentials'.

In my defence, these are tried and tested tools, I use them everyday to manage my network and services and wouldn't be without them. I don't like bloat or 'stuff' just for stuff, but when we get into metrics - the 'pretty graphs' can be super useful to understand at a glance if I'm under an increased load or something just doesn't look right.

Introduction

This guide has been written around routeros 7.23.2 but should be applicable to earlier versions and has certainly been validated back to 7.19.0. It was written using a Mikrotik RB5009UG+s+ configured via Winbox 4.2.

There is a presumption that the reader understands the differences between IPv4 and IPv6, notably the fundamentals of how IPv6 works and the ‘direct connection’ model. In this guide, we will not cover IPv6 NAT. We will also assign static /64 prefixes to each of our VLANs (or single LAN), rather than issuing it from the pool.