networking

OpenVPN is a reliable and time-tested VPN protocol that allows organizing secure remote access to a local network. MikroTik RouterOS supports OpenVPN in server mode starting from version 6.x (TCP), and from version 7+ — also UDP, but with a number of architectural limitations:

• mandatory authentication by username/password even when using certificates;
• limited list of ciphers and algorithms;
• absence of some features of “classic” OpenVPN.

Despite this, OpenVPN on MikroTik remains a popular solution — especially in scenarios where clients do not support WireGuard or compatibility with legacy systems is required.

Mikrotik routers are rightly valued by system administrators for their incredible flexibility.
A unique feature of this hardware is that a budget home hAP lite and a powerful enterprise router costing thousands of dollars run the same operating system — RouterOS.

That means once you learn to configure one device, you can manage any equipment from the brand.
In this article we’ll go over the fundamental steps to set up a Mikrotik from scratch to a fully working state.

If I were sent to a deserted digital island and allowed to take only one networking utility — I would unhesitatingly choose Netcat.

The official documentation (man nc) dryly states: “a utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP.”
In practice it’s the Swiss army knife of the network engineer, replacing dozens of specialized programs.

The article uses examples for OpenBSD netcat — this is the one that ships by default in Ubuntu 20.04+, Debian 10+, Fedora, Arch, Alpine and most modern distributions.

Read more

This guide will show how to configure two Linux servers so that all the Internet traffic from a specific local subnet (for example, 10.100.10.0/24) is routed not via its default gateway but through an IPIP tunnel to a remote server, which will then put that traffic onto the Internet.

This is useful if you need services in one subnet to go out to the world with the IP address of another server — for example, to bypass restrictions, centralize NAT, or hide the source.

In today’s world of networking technologies, combining two remote offices into a single entity is a fairly routine task. Usually, L3 tunnels are used for this (for example, IPIP or IPsec). However, there are situations when simple routing is not enough and full L2 connectivity is required, as if remote devices were connected to the same switch.

Let’s figure out when this is necessary and how to configure such connectivity correctly so that it is not only working but also fault-tolerant.

Hello! If you’re even a little interested in the web, you’ve probably heard of curl. It’s a powerful and versatile command-line tool for interacting with web servers. It is used to send and receive data over various protocols: HTTP, FTP, SFTP, as well as mail protocols.

This guide is your first step. We’ll focus on the basics to help you understand how curl works and how to use it for everyday tasks.

VPNCloud: Building Your Private Network in the Cloud

In a world where more and more services are moving to the cloud and remote work has become the norm, secure and private access to your resources is more important than ever. Traditional VPN services, while solving some problems, are often centralized and may not be the most flexible solution for creating your own secure network between multiple servers, devices, or even offices.