Lineage and licence

This page answers where mikroscope’s code came from: which packages started as someone else’s, what was changed when they arrived, and under what licence. The attribution is also in the code, so it survives being read without this site: in the package doc comment of internal/router, internal/image, internal/chart and internal/dashboards, in internal/rosapi’s README.md and LICENSE, and in the header of .golangci.yml.

Where the sampler came from

The sampler that proved this works is cmd/perfmon in 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.

What was taken, package by package

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 (arm images declare `v7`) 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	Only the import path
`.golangci.yml`	cs-routeros-bouncer, itself 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.

What was modelled, not taken

internal/dashboards takes its Grafana export shape from cmd/gen_dashboards in the owner’s ghchronicle — “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 the same way, after a reference project this documentation does not name: the dashboards’ named sections follow that project’s sections.go, and the end-to-end suite under test/e2e/ follows its suite.

The RouterOS API client

internal/rosapi has two generations of lineage. mikroscope’s copy is cs-routeros-bouncer’s, with nothing modified for mikroscope; 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 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 it is 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.

What differs from upstream v3.0.1

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

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.
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.
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.
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 jmrplens; the full text is 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.