Important things to know when trying to test or use MPLS Traffic Engineering in a Mikrotik RouterOS 7.x network.

Config Required!

You need both an MPLE TE area, and an MPLE TE address defined! If either is not defined, you will have problems establishing an traffic engineering tunnel.

UI Issues with Hops

Winbox (3.x and 4.x both) AND the web UI are currently broken and can’t build a list of hops that the OS likes. Tunnels with paths built thru the UI show as “invalid”, and the paths don’t show anything at all when exported from CLI.

Paths built from CLI don’t show up in the UI either (lists of strict hops show up as empty loose hops) so definitly don’t hit ok and save any of your paths in the UI!! You need to use the CLI to do any additions or changes to your paths that have hops.

This appears to be a somewhat long-standing issue in 7.x. I will certainly update this post, should any specific versions start fixing this.

Building Hops

When building a list of hops, you specify both sides of the link, not just the far side that shows up in traceroute.

If you are using 192.0.2.0/30 on a routed link, you’ll need to put hops=192.0.2.1/strict,192.0.2.2/strict using only hops=192.0.2.2 would not be enough.

Note: Since you’re doing both sides of every link, make sure that you’ve got the hops actually listed in the correct order!!!

If you always use the lower IP address on the side of a link thats closer to the core you may save yourself some headaches here. That is not always possible in every situation however.

Troubleshooting

traceroute shows the return path, so it probably won’t be very helpful for troubleshooting.

Additionally, MPLE-TE tunnels are unidirectional, you would need to build the same thing in reverse to get return traffic to follow the same hops.