Hi folks, I've read the forum for a while but here is my first question. I was settig up interVLAN routing on my switch and RB750GL router, when I noticed that I couldn't ping the default gateways on the router anymore. So I restored a known good backup on the router, but that didn't fix the problem. I took a closer look, and even though the backup had all of the default gateways they didn't get recreated when I restored (and I know they're in the backup because I also did a config export at the same time I created it). I manually recreated the gateways, but the issue still wasn't resolved. So I decided to do a netinstall on the router, which appeared to be successful but then I couldn't ping the router at 192.168.88.1. I had to use MAC Winbox to get on the router, where I saw that the device had no bridge or IP address assigned even after the netinstall. I tried netinstall again a couple of times, doing things like manually assigning an IP and checking the default config box, but still never got a working IP config. The router had 6.41, and I even tried upgraded it to 6.42 rc2 since that allowed me to get the upgrade firmware file that 6.41 didn't have. Still no luck.

So I don't know where to go from here! Does anyone have advice on how to get a working default config on the router? I posted this in beginner basics because maybe I'm just doing Netinstall wrong, but could this possibly be a 6.41 thing?

Hi

Have you tried factory restore? System>Reset configuration
Then you can apply your backup (if for same version) or export settings.

Thanks for asking - I did do System > Reset Configuration as well, and even used the reset button to do the same thing.

I always thought that Netinstall could reinstall the OS and apply the default config, but in this case it doesn't seem to do that. I'm hoping I just did something wrong, but not sure what else to try...

Is it a software or hardware issue? is the port alive? Maybe it decided to die...

That's a good point, I know that ether1 works because you have to use it for Netinstall. But I hadn't thought about explicitly testing the rest of the ports since I was seeing link lights. So I went ahead and tried MAC Winbox on all of them and verified they are working. I got the box back in shape by downgrading to 6.40.5, doing a reset config, them upgrading back to 6.41, and doing another reset config. At that point I was able to get interVLAN routing up and running like I wanted to do in the first place. This is what I learned:

Don't use Netinstall to upgrade
Don't use Netinstall to downgrade
Don't use Netinstall to apply the default config

Thanks sebastia for your suggestions, they were much appreciated...

1) Backup sotres all configuration of router. Either you made it while such configuration was not present or you made it on another RouterBOARD model or RouterOS version and such configuration simply could not be applied on your current router/software;
2) If you did Netinstall device without "Keep old configuration" and without any configuration scripts, then of course there was no configuration on device;

Netinstall device, connect to it through MAC address, run command "/system reset-configuration".

Please do not post such messages like:
Don't use Netinstall to upgrade
Don't use Netinstall to downgrade
Don't use Netinstall to apply the default config

They are misleading. All of these three possibilities are working without any issues (if configuration can be applied on RouterOS version - for example, you can not apply feature settings on RouterOS version which does not support such feature). Netinstall is used every day all over the whole World. It is working if properly used.

I'm just reporting what I personally experienced. I specifically posted this in the beginner forum with an acknowledgement that I might have done something wrong. If Netinstall can be reliably used to do all those things, I'm glad for such a useful tool and I look forward to seeing better documentation of these features in https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Netinstall.

So a few things:

Did you get the backup from the exact same device you were restoring it to?

There was a time when MikroTik renamed interfaces. For example, at one time the external interface was called "ether1-gateway" and this was change to simply "ether1".

If you're trying to add an address to "ether1-gateway" from the backup and it no longer exists, that could be your issue.

This is just one example of something that could have changed, there are others.

You would have to do an /export from mac-telnet and compare it to your old /export to see if something like this is the problem.

Yes, exact same device. I only have one RB750GL, and that's the only device I was working on at the time. I know you can't mix backups between devices, even if they are the same model. But I'm glad I got the box back up. It's a decent little performer and the 64 MB of NAND lets me have 3 partitions.