(Post edited on 22-03-2024 for coherency, clarity, reworded subjective comments for accuracy, removed false accusations etc., should retain originality otherwise)

Hello

I'm new here and this is first time I'm using any kind of a serious Cell / Mobile Internet antenna / modem device and I'm totally new to Mikrotik and RouterOS products.
I'm however relatively well experienced with all things PC/Windows/Linux (including sysadmin / maintenance / troubleshooting / hardware setup and repair) and Home (SOHO) Router configuration and tweaking in general. I lack professional (enterprise) networking experience, so on the networking side I'm rather basic to mediocre.

I was able to do the initial quick setup of the ATL LTE18 Kit.
I was able to log in via WebFig, initially using EndeavourOS (ArchLinux)
The modem shipped with a version from September 2023 - I forgot now exactly which one but I think it was 7.7

Followed the instructions: I changed the password, entered the SIM PIN number, and LTE1 started working on the ATL but no WAN for LAN clients, then I clicked various buttons to "Check For Updates".
It offered version 7.12 I think, which wasn't the latest, I didn't want to upgrade just yet and proceeded to familiarize with the rest of the GUI, navigating around other settings.

A few minutes later while navigating the WebFig, I wasn't able to re-login and the whole device ended up being inaccessible. I don't know if I did something wrong, I definitely didn't hit "reset configuration" nor did I apply any settings. I tried on a Windows 10 PC as well, same problem. Configuration via SSH or Winbox is not possible either. As far I'm concerned I think it's some kind of a bug.


Inspecting with Wireshark reveals recurring TCP retransmissions and basically no response from the ATL LTE18 modem.
On EndeavourOS's Firefox, after around 5-10 minutes of trying to connect to WebFig, it does display the login page, but after entering the password the same non-responsive delay happens and after around 5-10 minutes it just displays the fresh login page again without any explanation.
On Windows 10, Firefox times-out much earlier so none of these things happen.

The device does not seem to be able to reset or the procedure is different for this modem, I will keep trying in case I'm doing something wrong.
The device did not enter Etherboot mode for Netinstall on my first attempts either, just nothing happens or I am not doing something correctly, will keep trying.

Other comments:
The official RouterOS online Help Pages seems to be a bit confusing on first glance, there's signs of improper english, and some terms seem mixed up, sometimes one sometimes another term used for the same thing.
Fairly confused with the NetInstal utility, some of the tooltips at some point say that I would need to apparently "enter BIOS on my PC and enable PXE boot", which I really didn't understand why would I need that for, while the NetInstall Help Page doesn't seem to mention it. I stopped trying for the day because that's probably not the correct path I'm going with this.

The NetInstall Help Page also mentions to "check with device specifics" but there are no device specific instructions for how to enter Etherboot mode in the offical RouterOS Help pages, the hyperlink there just jumps to the common instructions for "Reset to Etherboot" giving no additional information. Nothing extra in the printed manual that came with my device.

On the other hand I'm not really complaining, as I'm used to this kind of stuff, especially when dealing with something new, this is just the kind of process one has to go through and I expect most of it being just on my side to figure out. I never knew these kind of devices are that advanced and complicated, definitely not meant for ordinary people without computer experience to be setting them up. I've only ever "used" a little PnP LTE-USB dongle for a few weeks, that's as close I came to wireless LTE internet before.

I haven't contacted official support yet, I feel it's too soon, but if it's completely bricked, it needs to get replaced ASAP because I'm setting this up for someone else and they're not the patient type.

Thanks for sugggestions.

(Major edit 23-03-2024 - for coherency, clarity, reworded subjective comments for accuracy, removed false accusations etc., should retain originality otherwise)

Why on earth do I need an account to contact official support?

This Mikrotik stuff is quite a bit different business than usual ... ordinary people would definitely not have the patience for this.

It is very strange that Winbox cannot access the device via MAC.
But Windows 10 can be tricky with the network connection.
Maybe you could try Winbox under WINE on your Linux computer.

(Post edited 23-03-2024 for corrections on clarity, coherency and rewording of various comments, clarified steps for troubleshooting purpose)

So I guess we may have some kind of a hard brick going on here?
If I'm doing everything correctly, it's looking more and more that the only option to get this resolved is a replacement, still it's too soon and I obviously won't quit just yet.
I've repaired many devices by sheer perserverence in the past, this is what made me good at maintaince, resolving various software issues, I would just go deep and get to the bottom of things. So there's no impatience on my side.

I'll be reporting more troubleshooting info:

On Windows 10 I tried (ASUS ROG Strix X570-E Gaming with Intel Ethernet Controller I211-AT - I never used the 2.5Gb Realtek one):

Connecting with Winbox
Connecting with SSH
Connecting with HTTP
Connecting with HTTPS
Netinstall, without PXE boot, with PXE boot client to 192.168.188.252
(I still have no idea what PXE boot mode is all about and whether I need it or not)

On EndeavourOS (Arch) Linux I tried (ASUS P9X79 with Intel 82579V Gigabit Ethernet PHY) :

Connecting with Winbox GUI (AUR)
Connecting with Netinstall GUI (PXE Boot client to 192.168.188.251, that's the IP the DHCP gives the computer, no idea if I'm doing it right)

Netinstall seems to do only listening, no sending of any packets apparently.

All while scanning with Wireshark. I have the dump logs saved and will post them if necessary.

Analysis:
The modem seems to behave differently each time it is tried to be put into Ethermode, there's no consistency even tho I believe I'm doing things consistently by pressing the reset button before powering it on.
There's a few patterns between reboots, most of the time it's one, sometimes there's a lot of "gratitious ARP" and more rarely there's a lot of "BOOTP" packets, otherwise things are mostly coming from the computer's side, while the modem keeps saying DESTINATION UNREACHABLE or just not answering to any requests.

In a pessimistic view: Nothing worked, none, the antenna's modem just keeps DHCP going, DNS requests never get replied, mode button doesn't apparently do anything that I can notice, ethermode doesn't work, "nothing works", is it enough to be safe to say that this is a completely broken brick?

My clients here told me to stop wasting time troubleshooting and that I should contact the seller for a replacement ASAP, their patience is expectedly quickly diminishing.
I'm starting to agree but I'm not 100% ofcourse, I have more things on my mind to try.

(Post edited for corrections 23-03-2024)

(Post edited 23-03-2024 for major corrections)
Seems like this isn't the only case of an unresponsive device, for example: viewtopic.php?t=193783#p998986

And one post that explains how we beginners don't understand how NetInstall works, ... viewtopic.php?t=139614#p688623

It can't be obvious to a beginner, I never heard of "BOOTP" before until seeing it in Wireshark while dealing with this Mirkotik device for the first time. I have no prior experience in deeper networking topics, even though I'm well familiarized with other computer fields.

NetInstall isn't very self explanatory to be honest, but I understand it's a rather last-resort expert tool. Mainly I'm not sure whether the program is working or not since it doesn't indicate much, but I suppose nothing is correct if there's no activity from a RouterBoard device.

Mikrotik software also has a bit of it's own terminology context which I have to get familiarized as well, and prior experience can only go so far. RouterOS online help pages do seem to have some sentences with improper english. A number of things are also out of date, namely the fact that the subnet is 188 and not 88 anymore, perhaps it's not so across the board.

I apologize for the earlier attitude which I have since reworded out to focus on what actually matters, but I'm quite busy with this, I'll get over it. Sorry about that.

I appreciate the feature richness and configurability ofcourse, but honestly nobody expected this, most RouterOS features are sort of not strictly necessary for my client's needs. They're not really interested in the details, they would be just fine with a plug-n-play USB LTE dongle with half the speeds and signal quality of a 300 €uro antenna. I guess the decision was made, because a landline broadband or fiber is going to cost a lot to install in that relatively distant location, to "if we're doing it, we might as well do it really good", so that's how we came across Mikrotik.

One of the examples I tried on Linux (endeavour OS):

sudo ifconfig eno1 192.168.88.2/24
sudo ./netinstall-cli -r -a 192.168.188.3 /home/usr1/Downloads/routeros-7.14-arm64.npk
Version: 7.14(2024-02-29 12:30:03)
Will reset to default config
Interface Mask: 255.255.255.0
Using Client IP: 192.168.88.3
Using Server IP: 192.168.88.2
Starting PXE server
Waiting for RouterBOARD...
I also tried with 192.168.188 subnet, same result, netinstall-cli won't detect anything.

I could try on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed later, and will seek some networking help in case there's something misconfigured on my end (which isn't covered in official help)

Hi

The "ifconfig" utility which is mentioned in the RouterOS Help pages, is apparently quite outdated and many distros don't include it by default it seems. I'm not up to speed with all things linux so this wasn't obvious to me. Others pointed me to use "ip" instead, yet others wanted to avoid messing with the commands if my distro is using NetworkManager, because changes in NetworkManager will override anything set in terminal, but this is what Mirkotik instructs so I guess there's no choice.

https://www.linux.com/training-tutorial ... config-ip/
https://dougvitale.wordpress.com/2011/1 ... lacements/

I can see that the recent Mikrotik youtube videos do use "ip" over "ifconfig", so that's good.

Moreover, I'm switching openSUSE Tumbleweed to try on another distro as well, rule out a possiblity this is some kind of a distro issue, it's also my primary linux distro for quite some time.

sudo ifconfig eno1 192.168.88.2/24
vs
sudo ./netinstall-cli -r -a 192.168.188.3...

Consider specifying the interface explicitly in the following manner:

Code: Select all

sudo ./netinstall-cli -r -i <interface> -a 192.168.88.3 routeros-7.14-arm64.npk

And ensure that you use an IP address from the same subnet.

Thank you for your response! However major update!

I was able to "reset configuration" and that got me back to a working WebFig. I spent all this time trying Etherboot mode. Now I tried the basic reset and that made some progress.
I most likely did something wrong initially with the procedure when I was attempting to do a basic reset.
I had a friend helping me for ~3 hours holding those reset buttons in and replugging the cables, testing various combinations of holding the button, adjusting settings, scanning with wireshark ...
So we're doing our homework here! I hope nobody took my comments too personally earlier, and I did spoke too soon on some of the things ... very good practice to not jump to conclusions!

However, no time for celebration just yet. I had to reset about 3 times around, because the device falls back to being unresponsive again after a while of navigating the menus, or doing something specific to trigger such behavior, I don't know what exactly.
At one point the WebFig broke by-half and it displayed various pages all empty and not showing any details or entries.

I got LTE connectivity working later, but only showing cell information and signal. Ping to 8.8.8.8 or similar didn't work from the WebFig and LAN clients do not have WAN connectivity.
Continuing to read the documentation and will continue setting it up later ...

I'll pause on trying to do NetInstall / Etherboot for now, unless I'd really need it, but I might go back later to see if your suggestion had any difference ...

... very good practice to not jump to conclusions!

Just in case:
https://annex.exploratorium.edu/brain_e ... mping.html

More good news!

I did not gave up, hoping a FW upgrade and a different approach would solve the or avoid the issue.
This time around I ended up using a freshly installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed desktop OS with Firewall completely disabled, with just minimal customizations across the OS (cosmetic, locale, etc), while also completely avoiding WebFig and exclusively using WinBox via Wine.

Inspecting the .wine directory I found the sessions and cache location for WinBox, and judging by some of the folders there, it appears that the initial FW was 7.11.3 from September 2023, the intermediary was 7.12 from November 2023, and then finally the most recent stable 7.14.1

So this is what happened, it first offered 7.12, and after that I got similar problems, had to reset again to get it working with WinBox, upgraded to 7.14.1 and then upgraded "LTE Firmware", I don't remember anymore but I think I had to reset again, change password and enter PIN, but whatever happened for some reason it "all" started working with WAN for the LAN clients out of the box.

Side-note: Only after upgrading to 7.12 did the selection for other branches in the Updater started showing other versions, while on the shipped version 7.11.3 it was showing 7.12 on all selected branches, perhaps this is just due to a technical thing of not not being able to upgrade too big of a leap (that's a thing with some rolling linux distros, if you don't update often enough and then have a really big one at once, you can have breakeages) whatever it was it's not important anymore.

Right now it's been idling for more than 48h hours while I was doing some side-stuff on the connected PC, but I basically just disconnected and reconnected with WinBox, so not much of poking, might be another story once I continue setting things up. Most importantly I need to setup remote adminitration for example.

I also tried figuring out what's the "supout.rif" file, but didn't find it where it's saved at on the PC. Not sure what it is but it felt like something useful for troubleshooting? Quick glance, I found no search results on RouterOS Help Pages for "supout" or "rif" other than something minimal in Watchdog. I'll continue reading up on this.

On the other hand, I also need to figure out yet to which side is this antenna facing anyway. I'm currently at a location where there are multiple cell towers all around me with multiple obstacles so it's not so obvious which it's ususally connected to and because the antenna would ofcourse automatically pick the best signal, so matter where I point I ususally get relatively good connection, and I'm inside a building, they're not going to install the antenna at this location, so it's not up on a mast yet. I watched the official youtube video for the installation, it's no big deal ofcourse, and I would assume it's pointing away from the modem heatsink, and this would be only true for the LTE18 then, because other models seem to be pointing toward the modem's heatink which is obvious because they don't have a plastic cover.

----------
One of the most problematic aspects of this was actually manual process of rebooting the router by having to physicall unplug-replug the cable while interacting with the reset button, I have no nice words for this, having to do this hundred times, the area is small and RJ45 connectors can sometimes be a pain to physically disconnect with big fingers when there's obstacles (frame), it has to be perfectly aligned, and in this case especially there's a waterproof cable restraint directly in the way making the positioning of RJ45 even harder.
If this device had a physical on-off switch it would have been quite a bit easier, isn't there an EU regulation that makes these mandatory (I guess there's exceptions perhaps).
Unfortunately I got the idea too late, I should have used my own on-off switch on the PoE injector power supply or somewhere else.

Speaking of the cable restraint, I didn't touch it further, I didn't figure out how to use that yet, there's no instruction in the manual, apparently you need to cut it by length on top or what?

Also I've updated previous posts in this thread, clarifying some of the steps, rewording, fixing sentences and removing or rewriting some of my subjective comments, speculation and initial false accusations.

-----------
Report on previous issues:

When the device "doesn't work", it will do still do LAN DHCP, and it will generate some usual activity such as NTP and mDNS, but won't respond to any kind of configuration attempts. It will refuse TCP connections, and flatly won't respond to MAC-Telnet. After the first upgrade however, I noticed it seemed to be apparently talking with someone on WAN over TCP/TLS, despite no WAN (DNS) working when I would go to Firefox to try to browse. I don't know what kind of phenomenon that was but it was connecting to help.mikrotik.com and forums.opensuse.org, which were one of a number of open tabs in other Firefox windows I was connected to while being connected to a landline fiber connection earlier, perhaps some kind of a reconnection going on.

I'm attaching Wireshark logs here: However DNS requests were filtered out of these logs on save by default, as they always just kept being unanswered and riddled the log, I probably should have included them for this report, but I can't anymore, unless I make a new scan if the similar issues reappear.

Another observation: Perhaps some of the issues were due to me using the latest Winbox version with the older FWs on the ATL LTE18 modem?

Thanks for any further suggestions.

... very good practice to not jump to conclusions!

Just in case:
https://annex.exploratorium.edu/brain_e ... mping.html

Indeed!

For the time being I will consider this resolved because on the latest version of 7.14.1 "everything" seem to work as intended by default.
The connection with WinBox is consistent, it reboots and resets configuration, and basic internet connectivity is also quickly established by simply entering SIM PIN.

I will open a separate thread for any other configuration assistance if necessary.