I'm the new sysadmin at a company, and the current setup uses a MikroTik hEX lite as the main router. It's been working fine, but I recently realized it's been limiting the internet speed to 100 Mbps because of the Fast Ethernet ports. The crazy part is they've been paying for a 500 Mbps connection for years without realizing it.
While looking through some old equipment, I found a MikroTik hEX S that had never been used. Since it has Gigabit ports, I figured I'd swap it in. I backed up the configuration from the hEX lite, restored it onto the hEX S, and installed it.
The problem is that the hEX S won't pull a DHCP lease from the ISP modem. Everything else seems to have imported correctly, but the WAN interface never gets an IP address.
So far I've tried:
Using different Ethernet ports for the WAN.
Disabling and renewing the DHCP client on the WAN interface.
Cloning the hEX lite's MAC address onto the hEX S via the terminal.
Still no luck.
Has anyone run into this before or have any ideas on what I should check next? Any help would be appreciated.
Never export backup on device A and import on device B if they are HW wise not identical.
Best to create config export, move to pc, and then use terminal on Hex S to put relevant parts back in, block by block, paying attention to what is already there as default.
It might also be a good time and a useful exercise for you as a new sysadmin, and new to mikrotik, to NETINSTALL the router to a fresh configuration of the latest stable firmware, believe that is 7.23.2
Also be advised that ether1 ( perhaps now remedied ????) is not recommended for WAN, choose one from ether 2-5 instead.
This will give you a clean, since we dont know what was on the router before, best security practice!!, firmware WITH default settings. Then you can start to migrate, manually the settings from the old router to the new router ( using winbox is easiest to view both and make changes). Judicious use of SAFE Mode will ensure a smoother transition.
I also recommend taking ether1 ( lets say using ether2 for WAN ) as on OFF-Bridge port to safely make all changes from.
FIRST, enter the router after netinstall ( now with default settings in place) on ether2 to modify the username and password settings. Then before anything else.
Then the below:
a. go to bridge and ensure ether1 is not on the bridge ( shouldnt be )
b. add an Ip address 192.168.77.1/30 interface=ether1 network=192.168.77.0
c. add ether1 as a member to the interface list called LAN ( and remove from WAN )
d. Ensure ip dhcp client is disabled ( not worrying about WAN for the moment as its set to ether1 )
e. Plug your PC/laptop into ether1 and change the ipv4 settings to 192.168.77.2 and then via winbox you should be able to gain access to the router with your self-assigned username and password.