Installing RouterOS on a WRAP

[GlueGuy]

I don’[t know that our WRAP-based tiks take a “long” time. It’s certainly not a few seconds, but it’s also not “several minutes”. I’d put in the 45 seconds to a minute range, but I’ve never timed it.

You may just have a miss-match between the baud rate, and other serial port settings. Read the quick-setup section of the manual. I think that the default baud rate for a WRAP card are different than for a routerboard, and you also want to turn off the hardware-based flow control. So double-check those settings, or else set them to what you need & try it again.

[bushy]

I’ve changed a few wraps to Mikrotik instead of that other crap from across the Atlantic and i’ve seen few problems a few times with certain brands of 64meg CF cards. 128’s generally don’t seem to give any trouble.

The easiest way I found was to get a CF to IDE adaptor and use the install .iso. ( remember to include the Routerboard package ) .
Then when its finished installing packages , reboot the PC from the CF card and leave it finish off.
Then boot the CF in the wrap , find it with winbox and disable "flow control " under “Ports” and set the speed to match the speed set in the BIOS of the wrap.
Boot the WRAP once more with a serial cable connected and make sure its working properly.

On a side note the WRAP gives an ~ extra 8megs throughput with Mikrotik…

[bushy]

Hope this helps you …

@lispie

Just to add something to this. I have inherited a network based on Locustworld and am looking at redoing it in Mikrotik to overcome a few problems and create some consitency with my other networks.

I am not sure if it is “normal” but when I tried this on a Wrap 2C, it kept stopping on “Ready” as if waiting for input, but was totally unresponsive.

I had thought it’d failed.

However, after several attempts, trying this and that, (I set the baud rate to 38400 on the Netinstall) I had left it there for a while and after a few minutes it rebooted, put up a lot of strange characters, and then the clear screen with a few strange characters once more.

If you could read it , it is saying " Generating SSH key , Generating DSA key " , it takes a bit of time to do that .

You can change the serial speed in the BIOS of the WRAP to match the default of Mikrotik so you can read all the boot up stuff with changing speed of your client halfway through. NOt important now , but may be later if you have trouble.


If you use Winbox at this point , you can use it to log in , you don’t need to set an ip or gateway.

@lispie

It looked to me like a login in gibberish, so I typed “admin”, hit enter, and up comes “Password:”
“Yipeee!” Hit enter again and up comes Mikrotik! Set the IP and gateway, and Winbox connects!

[sten]

Boot any BSD or recent Linux on it and you should have no problems.
The WRAP is a pretty cool product even though it is getting relatively old. It’s only real Achilles heal is the DMA problems.

[lispie]

Hmmm… might try another CF.

Thanks for the replies.

[lispie]

Well tried another CF (128) and it boots in 30s, so it looks like it was the CF (which didn’t boot in 3 minutes last time I tried).

Everything is fine, but it still comes up with gibberish at the initial login prompt, even though I have set the WRAP to match the MT baud rate.

Thanks everyone.

[sten]

some CF cards have broken controllers or work just plain slow under PIO.
Sandisk 128MB ones as an example.

Gibberish at the login prompt is that routeros defaults to 9600 for the login prompt.
It is actually easier to change the baud in the WRAP BIOS to 9600 for simpler access.