Situation: I obtained a surplus RB953GS-HnT which had a previous life as an city-wifi AP. I logged in using Winbox using a wifi connection to the board. As I wnated a clean slate to configure the router I stupidly pressed ‘reset configuration’ with ‘do not use default configuration’ checked. (afterward I read somewhere that this disables all the interfaces)
Problem:
I cannot get acces to the board anymore. There is no wifi network. The ethernet ports are flickering when connected to a laptop but the board does not show up on Winbox or netinstall (tried on win10 and ubuntu with wine). Cable is not the problem. Tried all three ethernet ports. Even tried a cross-over cable. All to no avail.
Also, I cannot seem to get the board to go into etherboot mode. There is a reset button which seems to halt the booting process when pressed but does nothing thereafter. There is also a reset-hole which doesn’t seem to do anything at all.
I do not have a null-modem cable nor have access to a pc with a serial port.
As said, I am desperate and working on this for 2 days already with no result. Help.
Anytime i have had problems with netinstall with a w10 laptop, i disable all wifi interfaces, i plug the laptop into a switch, i configure a static ip on the laptop ethernet interface, plug the router board into the switch, then attempt to do the netinstall. This works for me 99% of the time. Remember to hold the button till router pops up in netinstall.
Seems like your doing netinstall right…but on Windows 10 disabling the firewall isn’t so simple to do right I’ve found, you have to follow the NetInstall wiki pretty exactly for it to work: https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Netinstall
But if your hardware was previously working, no default configuration doesn’t require netinstall to fix. What you need to do is back to the default configuration. If you read https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Reset, you’d see you need to hold the reset button for 5-7 seconds WHILE applying power. If you do that right, ether2 will have DHCP on it again and you can connect using IP from winbox. make sure to keep a steady hand: the button needs be depressed continuous while somehow you apply power – any moment of weakness, you FAIL.
If that doesn’t work, you can always use winbox and the MAC address of the RB953 to connect. If you leave the static IP address configured on your PC, you should be able to use the MAC address from Mikrotik sticker as the “Connect To” address in winbox, including the colons, like: B8:69:F4:81:81:18. The “no default configuration” is sometimes useful since you can start configuring with a clean slate. But you need to use the MAC address to connect from winbox - no serial cable required.
Thanks for the suggestions. It’s not showing up on either winbox or netinstall whatever port I use and whatever time the button is pressed. The mac-adresses on the sticker (there are 2?) do not work either.
This is on the wiki page on resetting you linked to:
Resetting the RouterOS configuration
If you keep holding this button for 2 more seconds until LED light starts flashing, release the button to reset RouterOS configuration to default (total 5 seconds)
In my case, the leds that light up are solid and stay that way no matter how long the button is pressed. If I release the button between 1-10 seconds after applying power, the router seems to boot (first 1 beep, after a few seconds 2 beeps). If the button is held longer it does not boot but leds stay solid.
make sure to keep a steady hand
Yes I noticed that, I use a small wooden clothes peg which works nicely.
I have given up for now. Unless somebody has another suggestion I will store the unit until I find the time and motivation to look for/make a serial cable.
If you just turn it on without doing anything with reset button and get two beeps, RouterOS should be running. And with blank config it should show in WinBox under Neighbors tab.
If it doesn’t, first easy thing to try is to install Wireshark and have a look if there’s any sign of life from RB on interface. If the system is running, it should be sending CDP/LLDP/MNDP packets once a minute. Those should be seen by WinBox and if you disabled firewall nothing should block them, but you never know.
If everything fails, there’s always the option with serial cable. The need to get extra hardware may be an obstacle, but any cheap usb to serial cable will do. And it’s useful thing to have.
If it doesn’t, first easy thing to try is to install Wireshark and have a look if there’s any sign of life from RB on interface.
– good idea
There is also a Woobm-USB: https://mikrotik.com/product/woobm – I kinda forget about them but if you saw traffic with wireshark and still couldn’t get in… The $16 usb stick provides independent WiFi to allow terminal access to your RB953 (which has a USB port needed for it).
Ok thank you for all your help and suggestions. I am beginning to think there is something wrong with the ethernet ports of the unit as Wireshark does not show anything on any of the ports I tried.
I ordered a Serial-USB cable and will try to work with that.