Mikrotik stops routing

RouterOS General
1

I’ve got a MT (on an x86 machine) that I’ve put in as a hotspot controller to do bandwidth control & authentication on a network. It currently acts as the gateway for all devices on the network and sends all traffic out to a Cisco which controls our T1 to the internet. It has 3 ethernet ports which are all unfortunately plugged into the same switch right now. One is configred on a seperate IP network that it shares with the Cisco for internet traffic, one is used as the gateway for our wireless network and one is for a local lan on site. This was put in place late last week, and since then it appears that every 4 hours (now that I’m logging it, each outage has been every 4-4:20 after the last). The router doesn’t crash, and sometimes can be connected to on it’s internal ethernet interface from the internet (other times not). It is never able to be pinged on the ethernet port that shares a network with the Cisco. I’ve temporarily gotten around this by using the Watchdog feature to reboot the MT when it cannot ping the Cisco, and this always clears up the problem (until 4 hours later).

Any ideas what could be causing this? Unfortunately, the device is not local to me, so I want to be pretty sure what I do will fix it so that I don’t have to keep making trips out there.

Thanks,
::James

2

Does the switch to which you’ve plugged all three ethernet ports at least support VLANs and did you create separate VLANs / port groups for the three network segments, or is the switch one ‘flat’ layer 2 device and all three network segments end up being connected to each other?

If the latter is the case then you’ve created a mess that is beyond repair and should start over with a complete redesign of the network, with special focus of keeping the client-facing hotspot network seperate from the uplink network that connects to the Cisco for the T1.

–Tom

3

Unfortunately, it is the latter (not of my doing). I’ve wanted to redesign the physical layout, but have not been onsite to do it. The regularity of the failure really caught me off guard and thought it might be indicative of another problem, but I guess I’ll take care of this problem first (probably update to the latest OS while I’m there).

Thanks,
::James