We have some routerboards that are located on the far end of some less than 100% reliable links. It seems that if only a few (or possibly only one) packet is lost, winbox will disconnect.
Would it be possible to make winbox/RouterOS connectivity a bit more robust in the face of moderate packet loss?
Occasionally, when these links are really acting up, they may go down completely for 5 or 10 second periods and/or experience very heavy packet loss, but we’ve also seen winbox disconnect when the link only seems to have around 5% or less packet loss. I have one link like this where I am lucky if I can go more than a minute or so between winbox disconnects, even though the link works fine for webbrowsing/file transfers/normal internet stuff.
I SUPPOSE this might have to do with the encryption of data between WinBox and the router. Often encryption schemes get out of sync when losing to many packets in between. (This is the reason why encrypted PPPoE over a possible lossy wireless link usually isn’t the best option, for example.)
You could try to use unencrypted WinBox (removing the “Secure Mode” checkbox in the WinBox startup dialog) to verify this. But don’t say you haven’t been warned that your WinBox communication is unencrypted then …
It appears winbox will also drop if it ever gets an out-of-order packet, which can happen in some load balancing situations, or if a route somewhere in the network changes at just the right (er, wrong) time.
Turning off secure mode helped, but we are still getting occasional disconnects, and it appears now that this is the (or another) cause.
Even if it did disconnect - an auto re-connect feature would probably do, like the way windows remote desktop just reconnects and goes on like nothing ever happened except for a small pause in all io
I find it annoying to have to run winbox again and type the password etc… it should know that unless I click exit or system reboot or equivalent then I did not want to disconnect - if winbox detects app.close circumstances prior to those buttons being pushed the next next action should be re-connect attempt using the info it just had for the current session.
I see no reason this can’t happen especially with winbox - we are not streaming music or video here - we are reading data and writing data to the router - a brief pause makes no difference and would rid this annoying common problem.
i have luck with turning off secure mode and pppoe over wireless is spotty as hell , i suggest routing and lose the encryption unless you need it, you can also try to mess with your mtu size make sure you have the extra what 12 in ther to cover the overhead that comes along with pppoe. My guess is though that disable secure mode and lose encryption if that dont work
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