# Lineage and licence

Which parts of mikroscope came from cs-routeros-bouncer, ghchronicle and go-routeros, what changed on the way, and the MIT licence they arrive under.

Source: https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/about/lineage/

Parts of mikroscope started as code from cs-routeros-bouncer, ghchronicle and
go-routeros, all MIT-licensed. Below: which packages, what changed when they
arrived, and the licence. The attribution is also in the code, so it survives being read without this
site: in the package doc comment of [`internal/router/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/tree/main/internal/router), of the image
builder [`internal/image/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/tree/main/internal/image), of the chart [`internal/chart/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/tree/main/internal/chart) and
of the dashboard generator [`internal/dashboards/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/tree/main/internal/dashboards); in the API client's
own [`internal/rosapi/README.md`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/internal/rosapi/README.md) and [`internal/rosapi/LICENSE`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/internal/rosapi/LICENSE);
and in the header of [`.golangci.yml`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/.golangci.yml).

## Sampler origin

The sampler that proved this works is `cmd/perfmon` in
[cs-routeros-bouncer](https://github.com/jmrplens/cs-routeros-bouncer), built
for one benchmark and kept there as a developer instrument. The deployment steps, the
dockerless image builder, the deterministic chart and the vendored RouterOS
API client come from that repository, under its MIT licence.

## Imported packages

| mikroscope              | Taken from                                                            | What changed on the way                                                                                                                                                |
| ----------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| `internal/router`       | cs-routeros-bouncer `cmd/perfmon`, the deployment steps after PR #123 | Extended with quoted ports in every `find`, the optional `--expose` firewall pair, mikroscope's own container settings, and a listing of every write before it happens |
| `internal/router` tests | cs-routeros-bouncer `cmd/perfmon`, the containment tests              | Adapted to mikroscope's option names and to two rules of its own: quoted ports, and the `--expose` pair as part of the plan                                            |
| `internal/image`        | cs-routeros-bouncer `cmd/perfmon/image.go`                            | Reworked for the agent's name, the ARM variant (an arm image declares its GOARM level: `v5` by default, `v7` with `--goarm 7`) and a build goreleaser can reuse                                                              |
| `internal/chart`        | cs-routeros-bouncer `cmd/perfmon/chart.go`                            | The original drew its palette from a docs theme; this one carries its own, validated for the light surface (adjacent-pair CVD ΔE 9.1, normal-vision 22.9)              |
| `internal/rosapi`       | cs-routeros-bouncer `internal/rosapi`, taken 2026-09-11               | The import path; since then tests and the package README only (1.0.1, 1.1.0), nothing in the shipped code                                                                                                                                                   |
| `.golangci.yml`         | ghchronicle and gitlab-mcp-server, themselves based on `maratori/golangci-lint-config` | The module path                                                                                                                                                        |

What PR #123 brought, and what mikroscope's installer keeps from it, is the
containment rule: every object created carries one exact comment tag, every
removal selects by that tag plus the object's identity (never by pattern), and
`uninstall` verifies by ownership counts before it reports success.
Nothing is written without being listed first.

The chart's output is deterministic: the same input always yields the same
bytes.

## Modelled designs

The model is [ghchronicle](https://github.com/jmrplens/ghchronicle), the other
telemetry project of mikroscope's maintainer, José Manuel Requena Plens, which
collects what GitHub reports about an account. `internal/dashboards` takes its
Grafana export shape from ghchronicle's
[`cmd/gen_dashboards`](https://github.com/jmrplens/ghchronicle/tree/main/cmd/gen_dashboards)
— "the shape, not the code", as its package comment says — and
`dashboards check` checks every panel on a real Grafana the way ghchronicle
does. Two more pieces are modelled on ghchronicle the same way, the shape and
not the code. The dashboards' named sections, the first open and every other one
collapsed, follow its
[`internal/dashboards/sections.go`](https://github.com/jmrplens/ghchronicle/blob/main/internal/dashboards/sections.go);
mikroscope's list is [`internal/dashboards/sections.go`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/internal/dashboards/sections.go). And the
end-to-end suite under [`test/e2e/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/tree/main/test/e2e) follows
[ghchronicle's `test/e2e/`](https://github.com/jmrplens/ghchronicle/tree/main/test/e2e),
which builds its binary and drives it against a fake GitHub with one test file
per sink.

## RouterOS API client

`internal/rosapi` has two generations of lineage. mikroscope's copy is
cs-routeros-bouncer's, with nothing modified in the shipped code. What changed since is
tests and the package's own `README.md`: 1.0.1 added one Windows-only skip to
`client_test.go`; 1.1.0 added two coverage tests (`dial_cover_test.go`,
`unknownreply_cover_test.go`), extended `proto_test.go`, and wrote that 1.0.1 skip into
the lineage note of `README.md`. mikroscope uses it
for the API tier's reads, for `mark --log-markers`, and for the `/tool fetch`
relay. The bouncer's copy is
itself a pruned vendoring of
[`github.com/go-routeros/routeros/v3`](https://github.com/go-routeros/routeros)
at **v3.0.1** (upstream commit of 2025-02-16), MIT, copyright 2016 André Luiz dos
Santos, whose `LICENSE` file stays in the package.

### Why vendored

Upstream is effectively unmaintained: its last commit predates the copy by
eighteen months, and the pull requests and issues filed against the async mode
in mid-2026 (#31–#34) have had no maintainer response. No maintained
alternative exists: `swoga/go-routeros` is a copy that only receives
dependabot bumps for its GitHub Actions, and `jda/routeros-api-go` stopped in 2016. Vendoring keeps the code buildable and lets the copy fix and prune what it
uses.

### Changes from upstream

These changes were made in cs-routeros-bouncer and arrive unchanged:

1. **The async/listen mode is removed**, with its tests and the async branch of
   `RunArgsContext`. Nothing in the bouncer called `Async()`, `Listen()` or the
   context-cancelling run variants. The sentence-kind constants moved to
   `reply.go`, which consumes them.
2. **The protocol reader and writer read and write directly**, instead of
   dispatching every call to a fresh goroutine with a channel and a copy
   buffer; only the removed async mode ever cancelled an in-flight read. At the
   bouncer's production scale (22k address-list entries fetched every cycle)
   that layer cost ~294 000 goroutine spawns, ~62 MB of garbage and ~76 % of
   all allocations per reconcile cycle. The rewrite was checked against pristine
   upstream with a differential test: the SHA-256 fingerprint over all 22 037
   parsed sentences identical, error shapes identical (`io.ErrUnexpectedEOF` on
   truncation, `*DeviceError` on `!trap`), and upstream's suite green under
   `go test -race`. `proto/reader_shape_test.go` pins that behaviour. Those four
   figures are cs-routeros-bouncer's own, measured on its own host against its own
   workload, not on a router and not by this project; `internal/rosapi/README.md`,
   where they come from, records no date and no host, so none can be given here.
3. **The pre-6.43 MD5 challenge login is removed.** That login exists only
   before RouterOS 6.43 (2018), and answering it means hashing the password with
   MD5. A router that sends a `ret` challenge gets `ErrLegacyLoginUnsupported`
   instead.
4. **The async and listen-mode tests are removed** with the mode; the pre-6.43
   login tests assert the rejection instead of the handshake. The rest of
   upstream's suite is kept and passing.

Compare against upstream's `v3.0.1` tag, not its master branch.

## Licence

mikroscope is MIT-licensed, copyright 2026 José Manuel Requena Plens, whom the
licence names by his handle, jmrplens; the full text is [`LICENSE`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/LICENSE)
at the root of the repository. The code taken from cs-routeros-bouncer arrives
under that repository's MIT licence, and `internal/rosapi` keeps go-routeros's
MIT `LICENSE` beside the code it covers. What each release changed,
corrections to this page included, is in [`CHANGELOG.md`](https://github.com/jmrplens/mikroscope/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md).

## See also

- [Installer safeguards](https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/security/installer/): the containment rules the deployment
  code inherited, as they stand now.
- [RouterOS API tier](https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/sinks/api-tier/): what the vendored client reads.
- [Record, mark and plot](https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/record/): the deterministic chart `internal/chart` draws.
- [Tested on](https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/about/status/): what works today, and on what it has run.
- [Releases](https://docs.jmrp.io/mikroscope/about/changelog/): the current release, what it publishes, and where the
  history of every release, this page's corrections among them, is kept.