Long story short, I need to do a remote OS reinstall on a router that's several thousand miles away, and I don't have a local Windows machine to do the netboot with.

I've been trying for the better part of the afternoon to use an EoIP tunnel between two routers to do a netinstall, and it doesn't seem to be working - it looks for the PXE boot server, but can't find it. I can talk to it through the tunnel, though (testing on a working router).

Is there a trick to do this, or a way to remotely netinstall? I have a Mikrotik router as well as a Linux box remotely - I was planning to use the Linux box for the serial console, and then EoIP for the PXE bits, but it doesn't seem to work.

Alternately, is there a way I can do a PXE boot & netinstall from a Linux box?

-=Russ=-

I know this is an old thread, but some others may find the point of the thread useful, as i did.

I had a similar situation as OP where i needed to do a REMOTE netinstall to a RB 1200 that failed after updating from (routerboot 3.10 ) 6.11 to 6.19 , im not sure why this minor updated totally wiped my RB1200 (it never came back after reboot for update) and here is what the serial connection shows its error as:

setting up elf image... OK
jumping to kernel code
ERROR: no system package found!
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!


So i had a RB433 shipped to the data center where the the problem RB 1200 is, but before i setup a test setup at my office to do the remote netinstall and the remote netinstall scenario / setup, here is what i did:

2 mikrotiks, both ROS 6.X:

SSTP tunnel between the two RBs (any tunnel or link that passes layer 3 IP packets should work for EOIP)
EOIP tunnel between the two RBs

created a bridge on the master RB and added the EOIP tunnel and ETH 10
Created a bridge on the slave/remote RB and added the EOIP tunnel and ETH 3,

connected my windows 7 laptop with Netinstall to ETH 10 of the Master RB, set the laptops Ethernet port to static IP 192.168.1.2 , and ran netinstall and enabled PXE with a client IP of 192.168.1.3 (the ip it will give to the rb set to boot via Ethernet).

connected the problem/test RBs ETH 1 port to ETH 3 of the slave/remote RB and via serial set it to boot "from Ethernet 1st then nand"

ran netinstall on the laptop and rebooted the problem RB connected to eth3...and via netinstall , installed ROS perfectly!

so you CAN do netinstall via a EOIP tunnel, im not sure what the OPs problem or issue was, but im sure there are others out there that may need to do a remote netinstall if one of their RBs wacks out or screws up during an upgrade and needs a manual ROS re-install.

so now im shipping a RB433 pre-configured to the data-center (1200 miles away) that has my broken RB1200 so i can do this remote netinstall...it should work based upon my in office testing!

Mikrotik should prepare netinstall package for ros that would enable to make netinstall from one ros device to another ros device by just plugging the cable and powering the netinstalled device. This would help to many of us to make netinstall remotely easily in a standard way.

just wanted to follow up, the data-center got my pre setup rb433 and i was successfully able to run net install across the internet (via sstp tunnel and eoip tunnel + bridge) as described above in my post.

worked great! quite a few **.***..**...** when it was sending the initial kernel for the RB1200 to boot from (the step right before when you can then click install in netinstall) but this is to be as expected as in another post MT described how netinstall uses UDP and . = successful packet sent * = packet not sent successfully (so netinstall will keep re-sending the packet till successful)


it ran great! got my RB1200 back online..still dont know why the update hosed my MT boot partition in the first place, but now im going to make a 2nd ROS partition with the same config entirely for backup.

Thread Mining, sorry about that.

Just to confirm this remote netinstall is possible! That saves me a 600km round trip.

So I purposefully bricked a QRT to test this remote netinstall. I ignored all the address settings in the netinstall wiki and just used the DHCP assigned address my RB953 handed out and picked an address at random but in the same subnet for netbooting.

I added the EoIP port to the bridge on the RB953. I created a seperate bridge on the remote router and added the port for the EoIP and the bricked QRT on that new bridge. Then did a normal button initiated Etherboot and waited...

I found it helpful to keep an eye on the ethernet port of the bricked QRT, once the Etherboot is started you will start to see some data flowing towards the bricked device. You must be paitent, even with a 4G connection it took several minutes to transfer just the initial data to get the device to talk to the netinstaller. That initial data burst is about 4MB. Then you start the install process as normal from netinstall and that took a good 10-15 minutes.

Also save yourself some heartache, test your laptop/PC/whatever to a local device first to confirm the netinstall is going to work at all. At least on my laptop its pretty fussy and sometimes you will waste an hour or two before rebooting the laptop and then suddenly it just works..

Well I've just finished reloading the second SXT that I had bricked. Unlike the QRT, the SXT took about 10-15MB of data to get that initial boot phase sorted. Not sure why there was so much difference, but there was.