Hi everybody,
I am considering buying a CRS310-8G+2S+IN and have a question about the USB Port. What exactly does it? In the product video it is said to provide “additional RouterOS configuration options”. That’s kind of vague. What exactly can I do with it?
Thanks in advance.
-piratefish
P.S.: Also, why is the power input in the front of the switch?!? That does not make sense to me. Can somebody explain it to me?
Hi everybody,
I have done a little research and found the possibilty to plug a USB to serial adapter into the USB port to use it as a serial console port. Does that work with this switch? Do I need a specific USB to serial adapter or can I use any? Do I have to configure something on the switch for it to work? A console port would be quite useful.
-piratefish
Quoting the 7.6 release notes, “serial - added support for newer PL2303 serial controllers”. I would not expect every “PL2303” based adapter to work due to widespread cloning, but yes, RouterOS does support serial consoles. Whether that support is available early enough in the boot process to be useful is another question. Try it and report back, why doncha? 
You can also use this port for container storage.
Ah, so it is supported. Very nice.
Well, I have a tendency to configure myself out of IP access to my switches…to have a serial console at all would be quite useful in that case. 
If I end up buying this switch I will test it and report back how it went.
-piratefish
Hi,
Other possibilities:
Woobm-USB https://mikrotik.com/product/woobm for wireless console access.
Wireless 4G modem and setup VPN access for remote managment.
Monitor UPS through USB.
Yeah, I saw that option but I think I prefer the cable solution. Thanks for sharing though.
-piratefish
Hi everybody.
Here’s an update on the USB Console Port situation. I ended up buying the CRS310-8G+2S+IN (although I still think that the choice to put the power input on the front is…odd). I went ahead and tested Console Access using a USB-to-Serial Adapter cable. And what do you know…it works. With a caveat though, Console Access via USB is not available until the boot process is finished. The first thing you get out of this adapter is the login prompt. While I think it is still useful to have console access at all it might not suit everyones needs.
The adapter cable I used was this one:
https://www.dtechelectronics.com/dtech-high-definition-usb-to-female-db9-serial-port-converter-cable-support-usb-2-0-standard-to-rs232-1-8m-cable_p327.html
-piratefish
Aside from console access, can the USB port be used to mount a drive and then present it as a NAS share on the network?
Yes, via ROSE. The result is nothing like a modern NAS — no redundant storage options, for one, and no ability to manage external USB RAIDs if you try to work around the lack that way — but if your needs are simple, it suffices.
That looks quite promising. Use would be as a backup target.
Next question is what USB standard does this implement? Do we get higher speed USB 3.0 or are we stuck with 2.0?
Wasn’t the VAX famous for shipping a whole bookcase full of documentation with each major release, and didn’t y’all brag a lot about how you could search it all and come up with answers that we Unix fans had to go and dig into the source code for?
But okay, I will search the documentation for you once again. According to the product matrix, the current devices with at least one USB 3 port are:
I was checking the product specs and downloadable docs, but the details of the port weren’t there. The product matrix was a great lead, thanks!
Just beware: traditionally, ROS wasn’t known for exploiting full USB capacity when working with USB flash sticks. So if a device supports USB3, this doesn’t mean you will get 100MBps of file transfer rates (if USB flash disk can do it on normal computers), it might still be limited at some significantly lower numbers.
Things might have changed (for better) with recent hardware and ROSE package though.
ROSE looks pretty good and would meet our needs. However, with what looks like to be a limit of USB 2.0 throughput with the CRS310, this does not appear to be a practical solution. A modest Buffalo LinkStation would seem to meet our simple needs better for not much more than the cost of a USB enclosure and drive.
The CRS310’s CPU is quite a bottleneck for anything but the simplest of tasks. hAP AX3 or RB5009 would be far more powerful (and cost-effective) options for USB3 drive hosting.
If you really need some kind of all-in-one solution, CCR1036 and CCR2116 have M.2 slots for PCIe NVME drives, plus plenty of horsepower for routing and VPN tunnels, etc. The 2116 has more SFP+ ports, and an ARM64 CPU which supports containers. And it’s cheaper.
With the M.2 slot, I’ve added an M.2 to 6-port SATA adapter and with an external enclosure, I’ve been able to add six drives for ROSE to use. Kind of nerdy, but it’s a low-energy file server with decent transfer speeds.