It is not immediate/evident that WInbox can connect in two ways.
- via IP (like any “normal” tool, i.e. at L3)
- via MAC (using a proprietary protocol, at L2)
See also here:
If you click on the IP of a device that is listed in the lower part of the opening window:
the “Connect To:” field will be filled with the IP, but if you click on the MAC of the same device, the field will be filled with the MAC.
When you press the Connect button the connection will be (hopefully) established with the chosen device using the one or the other method.
In the example screenshot on the help page you can see that a few devices show an IP address of 0.0.0.0, this means that the connection is to a port that has no IP assigned.
Still, you can connect via MAC to those devices, in theory you could keep your Mikrotik devices without IP assigned and still be able to connect via MAC.
Even if possible, it is generally speaking not a very good idea, as while fiddling you could accidentally disable the MAC-server on the router or mis-configure the allowed interface-list and thus lock you out of MAC access.
A common enough issue when fiddling with IP addresses is that you change the IP (and/or netmask) of the port of the router but the IP (and/or netmask) of the computer you are using is not changed accordingly, connection via MAC bypasses this problem.