Hi,

Eactly as stated in the topic, I just bought 3 brand new Toshiba laptops, and none of them can use MAC Winbox anymore, which means none of my techs can get into an unconfigured router on site, which is ridiculous.

I have read many posts on the forum, but cannot find a solution.

I have winbox 2.2.13, I have cleared the cache, I can connect perfectly fine with IP winbox.

No firewall, nothing like that.

I hardly every picks up the devices with the "..." button, but when it does and you select/or type in a mac address, just fails and says "could not connect to MACISHERE (port 20561) timed out!"

Any ideas, please!

Still sounds like some firewall issue to me. I need to disable my F-Secure firewall (or modify it) in order to use auto-discover feature of WinBox.

absolutely not a firewall, it is disabled.

i have been trying to fix this for about 4 weeks non stop!

Vista does not stop winbox unless it is configured to do so. I use it every day on vista and it works fine. The laptop isn't picking on certain applications either. Has to be isolated to your software config on your laptop.

Scott

hes talking about mac winbox, more likely neighborhood viewer and mac telnet is what he means...

Doesn't matter, I use it like that daily... It's an isolated problem he has

Doesn't matter, I use it like that daily... It's an isolated problem he has

Not really. We've an Acer Laptop with Vista with exactly the same problem.
Disabled Firewall and all other possible stuff. No chance to find ROS-Box.
IP-Communication with winbox works. Never seen this with 2000/XP.
Laptop comes preinstalled with Vista. After hours of searching we've given
up.

Stefan

Well I know it can work with vista so it eliminates a global vista problem. Perhaps its the particular network driver or the version of vista?

I use vista ultimate and have intel nics. Maybe need to start drilling down on the vista version and the nic/driver versions to see if there are similar configs having problems.

Scott

I agree,

its definatley a vista thing, it does apepar to be software related, as I have 3 toshibas all exactly the same machines (bought at the same time) and 2 dont work, 1 does.

They came pre installed with vista, I know for a fact mac winbox did not work out of the box, as I tested it basically straight away (or at elast thats how I remember it)

If I use the mikrotik neighborhood view program, it finds the routers, but it takes a long time. Still cant mac telnet or mac winbox though.

I would have thought someone from mikrotik might be able to shed some light on this?

I see this happen when there are more than 1 network card in the machine. If you're plugged into it, disable the wireless interface.. If you're connecting wirelessly, disable the wired card. I've used mac connections in winbox on vista before, so it's not vista in general.

I see this happen when there are more than 1 network card in the machine. If you're plugged into it, disable the wireless interface.. If you're connecting wirelessly, disable the wired card. I've used mac connections in winbox on vista before, so it's not vista in general.

Just to confirm this, I had issues on XP with more than 1 NIC. Disabling every NIC except one I use to directly connect to RB solved the issue everytime. Currently, I use Vista with only 1 NIC, Winbox works fine, and my assumption matches jcremin's.

Cheers.

Not sure if it's related, but we found that any machine with the Cisco VPN client installed cannot mac telnet.
It sees the router thru (...), connects, then immediately disconnects.

This happens on any machine that has the Cisco VPN client installed.

In Vista drop to command prompt as administrator and try this:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

I'm not sure if this will fix your problem, but we had problems connectiong to our Terminal Servers after getting Vista Computers... something to do with IPv6

In Vista drop to command prompt as administrator and try this:

netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

I'm not sure if this will fix your problem, but we had problems connectiong to our Terminal Servers after getting Vista Computers... something to do with IPv6

Does not help here with my Acer-Lap.

Stefan

I see this happen when there are more than 1 network card in the machine. If you're plugged into it, disable the wireless interface.. If you're connecting wirelessly, disable the wired card. I've used mac connections in winbox on vista before, so it's not vista in general.

Just to confirm this, I had issues on XP with more than 1 NIC. Disabling every NIC except one I use to directly connect to RB solved the issue everytime. Currently, I use Vista with only 1 NIC, Winbox works fine, and my assumption matches jcremin's.

Cheers.

I've WLAN switched off. Does not help.

Stefan

Did you actually disable the card or does your laptop have a little switch or hotkey for doing it? My experience has been you actually need to disable the card either in the "network connections" window or in device manager itself.

Did you actually disable the card or does your laptop have a little switch or hotkey for doing it? My experience has been you actually need to disable the card either in the "network connections" window or in device manager itself.

I found it!! I had to disable not only the wireless card.
I have virtual VMWare Networkadapters from VMWare Player. I disabled them too
and now it works. So you're right. The connection to the MT-Box has to be the
only active one. Every other (virtual) Networkadapter has to be disabled to make
Winbox work in MAC-Mode.

I guess MS has done some changes in programming interface MT has to bother with
to make it work again. Or it's a bug in vista.

Stefan

Did you actually disable the card or does your laptop have a little switch or hotkey for doing it? My experience has been you actually need to disable the card either in the "network connections" window or in device manager itself.

I found it!! I had to disable not only the wireless card.
I have virtual VMWare Networkadapters from VMWare Player. I disabled them too
and now it works. So you're right. The connection to the MT-Box has to be the
only active one. Every other (virtual) Networkadapter has to be disabled to make
Winbox work in MAC-Mode.

I guess MS has done some changes in programming interface MT has to bother with
to make it work again. Or it's a bug in vista.

Stefan

Interesting: When there is a connection via MAC-Mode I can enable the interfaces
of the Vista-Laptop and the Winbox keeps working. So it's just a problem while connecting
to the MT-Box.

Stefan

Thats why I don't use virtual machines. The network bridge breaks stuff.

Completely breaks IPX if you play Warcraft 2.

Since you have mentioned cisco vpn client, just a quick note. When cisco vpn client is installed, all interfaces are modified to use a 1300 MTU instead of the default 1500. This makes winbox MAC access to connect and imediately (or with a couple of seconds later) disconnect, due to missaderstanding of fragmented packets.
The solution I found is to run an executable on the installation directory of vpn client named SetMTU.exe and change the MTU of the interconnecting interface to "default".
MAC access to your router should now work.

I have had the same issue and I figured it out that the newer vista machines have changed the default mtu from 1500 to 1496.

To check this open up command prompt and type "netsh interface ipv4 show subinterfaces" and it will show you the interface and it's mtu, notice the 1496.

To change it to 1500 type "netsh interface ipv4 set subinterface "Local Area Connection" mtu=1500 store=persistent"

And then you can now use winbox via mac address. And the mtu change is perminate.

Regards,
Michael Perdue
SmythNet
http://www.smyth.net

There's still something amiss.

I have a very recent vista based laptop and with default settings and both lan and wlan interfaces enabled i was able to use mac winbox straightup.

some network card drivers have problems with MAC winbox.

This problem is starting to come up way too often. How are we going to fix it?

Maybe I will be using the workarounds with disabling interfaces and with modifying MTU as posted above...

I've definitive better experience using Win7.
Use netsetman speeds things up.

What I know definitely, is that winbox device discovery fails if you are currently using a PPPoE connection or any other kind of PPP connection (like 3G/UMTS).
Also, connecting using a known MAC address is not possible unless i terminate any PPP(oE) connections previously.

That's on Windows 7 and Vista

rant rant rant

While ranting sure is an option - Maybe you could try to reproduce my findings

only change in windows as i see it is addition of fancy firewall that even when disabled is not completely disabled. I have already seen several cases when no packets are sent/received only because of "disabled firewall" in Windows 7. Good thing to check is to disable winbox encryption if you want to use MAC-winbox.

Also, MAC (layer 2) access is required only to set some small configuration to make router available through ip address. These things have never been intended for prolonged use and are expected to fail.

I think MAC Winbox is the best feature of RouterOS along with MAC-Telnet. )