Good afternoon! Faced a problem. installed mactelnet-client. I see routers and switches. But I can’t connect. For winbox, everything works. But the console is not. I tried both for Ubuntu and CentOS and install from source
Currently available mactelnet-client doesn’t support connections to ROS version 6.43 or newer. That ROS version brought change in how passwords are stored and change in logon procedures had to follow. mactelnet-client doesn’t seem to be maintained, hence necessary change never got implemented.
BTW, same change affected winbox as well, versions 3.13 or older can’t connect to recent ROS versions.
Many ROS admins use ssh for console connections for routine every day work.
It is maintained, but not all details about authentication are available. Read this for details:
https://github.com/haakonnessjoen/MAC-Telnet/issues/42
Thanks for the link. Makes things much more clear.
Thanks for the link. BUT it was these sources that I installed. Winbox is not suitable for me, I am a Linux user, and wine is not very fond of.
So why don’t you use ssh to access routers? mactelnet has one single function which ssh doesn’t: connectivity over MAC, which comes handy when IP setup gets south. But hopefully that’s not very often and I (being a linux/console nerd myself) resort to using winbox in such case (runs under linux / wine just fine). On the other hand ssh connectivity works over routed networks while mactelnet (using MAC directly) doesn’t.
I am not a big fan of windows applications. I am using SSH. Having received the router, I immediately clean out the config. Naturally, access disappears. Therefore, the problem.
Of course we use SSH for daily work. But “not very often” is still a valid case, for example when cleaning a board with “/system reset-configuration no-defaults=yes”.
Running Winbox from Wine is fine, but not always a choice: Sometime you have a server in the same segment where you do install neither graphical environment nor wine.
Luckily another Mikrotik is available very often to do the job. 
Anyway, a working mac-telnet from linux terminal would be very handy.
Mikrotik, please share information about authentication mechanism. You do not need to provide any code, just share that information!
+1
I know this is a quite a complicated workaround but helped me after I lost L3 connectivity and was looking for L2 access via mactelnet.
I happened to have raspberry pi on the site. By spinning up virtual CHR router on the raspberry pi (x86-64 emulated via qemu) I was able to access the router using ROS mactelnet. Details in http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/chr-the-dude-server-on-raspberry-pi-3b-or-4/142415/9
It would have been so much easier if mactelnet (which is available to many platforms and architectures) would work with the latest ROS and the login mechanism…
Avatar for mkx!!
If you poke him hard enough he falls over.
mactelnet is wonderfull when L3 has been messed up. A simple Linux client would be handy indeed.
+1
A simple Linux CLI application is required similar to Windows terminal.exe
https://mikrotik.com/download/neighbour.zip
The latest version now supports newer RouterOs versions, and it’s in the process of being updated towards debian/ubuntu, but that is a longer process. But in the meantime you can compile mactelnet from source and use it from mac/linux without issues now. 