My first post here and yesterday the first time I have ever heard of MikroTik / RouterBoard!
Here is my short[ish] story …
Was called out to a site that had a wireless installation. In main office a Draytek Router. Outside a mast with masthead box [too high to read lable] and another very similar at the other end of the site. Was told there was ‘something’ in the loftspace. That’s something was a RouterBoard 433 in a black box. The Draytek fed it on Eth1 and Eth2 went up to the first masthead (via a small PoE unit)
Heres the rub: The day after the entire sites wireless stopped working, a phone call to the install company informed the manager they had gone bust - so no one could come out but they could recommend someone else [who turned out to want rather alot of money!!!] This is where I was called [walked into this one] and whilst I have some knowledge of networks I may need a little help. First up there was no documenation. And no one knew the admin password to the Draytek. I could get the ‘welcome page’ to login to wifi but this was followed by a ‘Radius Server not available’ message once I had entired my time code. I take the RB433 away and find that is also has a password set, so end up doing a hardware reset. Then it struck me that Radius may have been disabled deliberatly?
In any case, I am now back at a default config and need to learn how to get all this backup again asap. Only I suspect it going to take a lot of reading and brushing up on my rusty network knowledge.
I have a record of the IP’s of the Draytek and eth1/2 on the RB433 and thats about it. As I am starting from scratch I dont suppose they are of much use anyway [altho I am not sure as yet which devices are in the masthead boxes?] Im assuming that my hard reset does not remove any of the login pages / auth code pages?
All they need is wifi around the site and I was therefore wondering if there any tutorials on setting up a hotspot using the RB433 or if anyone can offer me any other advice [well, apart from ‘don’t start from here’ lol!]
Nothing like being thrown in the deep end huh? lol
I have just started using the Mikrotik’s myself and have found the initial learning curve to be steeper than I thought it would be. I am certified in SonicWALL’s and thought this would be a breeze, but found myself having to do alot of testing and reading and testing. Here’s a post I made for helping to get started on alot of that, that covers most everything: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/please-help-with-my-rb750gl/53707/1
If they need something ASAP and you cannot figure it out w/your limited knowledge to networking, you might want to consider paying for your initial support to get your feet wet. I have seen this guy with quite a few posts on the forums here. I do not know him and have not used him, but was tempted to when I ran into a snag for my own setups but figured things out. He is a Mikrotik seller listed here: http://www.mikrotik.com/buy
If you were to use him, I would suggest calling and speaking with him, directing him to this post, and have the device in the environment ready to test so he can probably remote in and help you. Hopefully he will have a understanding of what you are trying to do and will be able to set it up quickly for you. The actual setup of things does not take very long at all. But sometimes its a matter of knowing exactly what to turn on and what not to turn on and etc.
“My” best help are in the links above. So hopefully you will find something there.
Good luck!
PS - btw - I was called out to a site several years ago with a routerboard installed between 2 sites for a wireless LOS connection, where the 2nd site was down. Long story short, the only thing wrong with it was that it was plugged into a POE connector and didn’t have a UPS on it. So when the power flickered, the sites would stop talking. I actually got a call on that same site early this week and someone had moved the UPS and had left that in a regular surge protector. Hope that helps too.
Those printscreens Pilgrim has on the wiki look really good. I always like looking at other posts because you never know what you’re going to learn. While I was looking at other posts in the forum, I stumbled on this guys site again down below. Its the CLI (command line interface) version, but is tweaked and current. You would need to tweak it for your own stuff, but is something else to look at: http://aacable.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/mikrotik-hotspot-quick-setup-guide-cli-version/
You might not be able to use that particular info on aacable’s blog because the info Pilgram has linked to is really good stuff. But it might be another good resource for other things.
ok I have learnt a few things about this box. After my hard reset I have made a few attempts at setting up my hotspot. And, Ive gotten pretty close. But not close enough.
LAN2/Ether2 gives out IP addresses from the pool. I can login to hotspot webif at the hostname or IP of the hotspot.
I get the login page but both my guest user and admin user result in a “Username/passsword not valid” type message. There is also the issue that typing google.com into the address bar results in a time out i.e. I am not redirected to the hspot login page?
Any tips / things to check?
Thanks!
ps I have mostly used the cli using the following as an example but changed it to suite my subnets
Another start from scratch and I can now get into the login page and my user is accepted and I get the status page.
One thing that I still cant figure however is that typing any other web address should be redirected to the login page right?
Well Im still getting just a time out. Reading elsewhere suggest checking DNS setting but I cant see where I have gone wrong.
One thing is ; my dsl router is still onsite so I am testing all this without the router present. Do you think that in itself could cause this issue with non redirect to login page?