Catching a bad RB1200

I have an RB1200 that keeps crapping out. Of course the watchdog never trips, so there’s never a supout created.

I have an RB450 consoled in via serial null modem. How can I configure the 450 to write everything it gets over serial to a file so that when the RB1200 dies again, hopefully I can catch a panic of some kind. Unfortunately RouterOS doesn’t have something like screen, otherwise I’d just hold it in memory until it crashed, reattached the screen, then view it.

Also, what would I want to flag on the RB1200 for writing logs to disk? I know that writing to disk a lot could cause premature failure of the disk, but maybe I don’t catch enough logging data to see it?

I don’t know that you’ll get the RB450 to do what you want, but if you have a general *nix box with a serial port, you can try : http://www.conserver.com/

Combined with http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Serial_Port_Usage you should be able to use conserver on a *nix box anywhere with continued IP connectivity to the RB450 when the RB1200 dies.

I setup an SSH session to the RB450 from a PC directly connected via Ethernet. I turned on logging in PuTTY. I used the RB450 to console into the RB1200. Now I sit and wait…