As of RouterOS 7.6 there is no official command to create a directory on a RouterOS filesystem. However, there’s a trick involving a SMB share. By creating the SMB share, RouterOS will create the directory. After that, you can delete the SMB share.
The following script will create the backups directory:
/ip smb shares add name=deleteme directory=backups ; /ip smb shares remove [find name=deleteme]')
The following RouterOS command will delete all files starting with backup-:
/file/remove [/file find where name~"^backup-.*\$"]
In order to delete a file named mybackup.backup on a RouterOS device using the terminal, use the following command:
/file/remove [find name="mybackup.backup"]
This example prints the identity (i.e. user-defined name) of the switch/router at IP address 10.0.0.1 with password abc123abc.
from netmiko import ConnectHandler
mikrotik = {
'device_type': 'mikrotik_routeros',
'host': '10.0.0.1',
'username': 'admin',
'password': 'abc123abc'
}
mikrotik_connection = ConnectHandler(**mikrotik)
print(mikrotik_connect.send_command(f'/system/identity/print', cmd_verify=False))
name: MySwitch01
The following RouterOS terminal command adds a User Manager user assigned to a VLAN with ID 998. This setup is compatible with Unifi access points.
/user-manager user add attributes=Tunnel-Type:13,Tunnel-Medium-Type:6,Tunnel-Private-Group-ID:998 name=myuser password=uNah2ieghi
Note that Tunnel-Type:13,Tunnel-Medium-Type:6 will always stay the same, they will tell RADIUS to assign a VLAN.
In WebFig, the same config looks like this:
In WinBox, these settings look like this:
On RouterOS, we can create a simple Wake-on-LAN script using a MAC address using
/tool/wol mac=DC:4A:3E:7A:87:12 interface=bridge
The following example uses MikroTik scripting to iterate over all ethernet interfaces and print the name of the interface:
foreach v in=[/interface/ethernet find] do={
:put [/interface/ethernet get $v value-name=name]
}Example output:
[[email protected]] > foreach v in=[/interface/ethernet find] do={:put [/interface/ethernet get $v value-name=name]} ether1 sfp-CoreSwitch-Uplink sfp-sfpplus3 sfp-NAS sfp-Virtualization sfp-WAN sfp-sfpplus4 sfp-sfpplus7 sfp-sfpplus8
In the default configuration, you can use snmpwalk using SNMPv1 to query information from the MikroTik RB260GS or RB260GSP.
snmpwalk -v1 -c public IPADDRESS
for example:
snmpwalk -v1 -c public 192.168.88.1
You want to import your SSH public key for passwordless login to your MikroTik router using either the terminal or WebFig/WinBox (as described in our previous post How to import SSH key to MikroTik RouterOS for passwordless login).
However, during import you see the following error message in the terminal:
unable to load key file (wrong format or bad passphrase)!
or in WebFig:
Couldn't perform action - unable to load key file (wrong format or bad passphrase)! (6)
Either you are using an elliptic curve key (which is not supported by RouterOS at the moment) or you are using a file which is not an SSH key.
The file you are uploading should look like this:
ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQC6EyAUma+shOkTZ0a6WcipSb552WmQb8hTKvDOMxQ234HXAeuJg3KeJ8WdkbOIdYuNq08xBrpjinaRGSZwDqhAiQMMz6O3yfkGpWZNO26lBQkngspJU1w6HLXR9tRtRaqbXwc1kV0KS6quj4sRaGLHKMciTjx0cVbEQrLxBXIJvRl7a6w/VukE+c9LhcRBZTrYB6Er7vGMM7VtgThzq+reFnql4kicG83NuPHjC/9Z78ehxpSekSrBYTYMuqiC1m8RW/l0mI8TtkUAU/qnTuwMXqVh0oOPGSWe4qvnbjCThRkDIEuK19CyCr5uyvZTV268SftEKaKOB7wcjevZlR11 [email protected]
The most important aspect is that it needs to start with ssh-rsa, else RouterOS won’t import it – RouterOS supports ed25519 keys since RouterOS 7.7, which is in beta at the time of writing this post.
You can generate a new keypair and save it to id_mikrotik and id_mikrotik.pub using
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 8192 -f id_mikrotik
Important: You can not use elliptic curve keys (tested with ed25519) as of RouterOS 7.6 – RSA keys will work!
First, upload the public key to the filesystem of the router using Files – in the following image, the SSH key is listed at the bottom:
/user/ssh-keys/import user=admin public-key-file=id_mikrotik.pub
Now go to System -> Users, open the SSH keys tab:
There, click Import SSH Key
open the user you want to add the public key for (typically admin if you didn’t create other users before):
then click Import SSH Key and the key will be active immediately
in System -> NTP client in your MikroTik router, the Status always tells you using local clock and it won’t synchronize with any NTP server.
You can’t disable the local clock in System -> NTP client. Instead, you’ll be able to find the relevant setting in System -> NTP server.
Ensure that Use Local Clock is unchecked and click Apply
After that, your NTP client will be active and able to synchronize:
The DNS server integrated into your MikroTik router doesn’t work and the log shows a lot of
DoH server connection error: SSL: ssl: certificate not yet valid (6)
messages:
The issue here is that the clock in your MikroTik router does not (yet) know the correct time.
For example, the clock might be set to 1st of January, 1970 – however, the TLS certificate of the DNS-over-HTTPS server is only valid from, for example, 1st of November, 2022. This is why the MikroTik router tells you that the certificate isn’t valid.
Just tell the MikroTik server to get the time from a public NTP server.
Open System -> NTP client in WebFig or Winbox. Typically, you want to use the upstream router as an NTP server. In my case, that is 192.168.178.1.
Ensure that Enabled is checked, add the NTP server and click Apply.
After waiting a few seconds, you should see synchronized under Status. This means that the clock of the MikroTik router has been set correctly and the issue should be fixed.
This solution decreases the security of your system and is hence not preferred. You should always set the time of your router correctly, not doing so will lead to a bunch of issues.
If you, however, still intend to disable DNS-over-HTTPS, open IP -> DNS and remove all servers under Use DoH servers, then click Apply.
After that, your router will use the normal DNS servers – 1.1.1.1 in my case. Ensure to enter some server there to make sure DNS requests work – if in doubt, you can always use 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) or 8.8.8.8 (Google).
Note that requests to those servers will neither be encrypted nor authenticated, so requests can be sniffed and/or manipulated by anyone capable of manipulating traffic to your device. Even though DNS-over-HTTPS is slighly slower (which, in turn is alleviated by the caching feature of the MikroTik router’s DNS server), it provides a huge security benefit.
In order to packet capture just DNS packets using Tools -> Packet Sniffer, use the following settings:
udp (17 (udp))53 (dns))Note that this does not capture DNS-over-HTTPS traffic, but at the time of writing this article, this type of traffic is rare.
Example:
On RouterOS up to at least v7.4.1 you can’t select ICMPv6 as IP protocol in the Tools -> Packet Sniffer
If you select icmp, you will not sniff any ICMPv6 traffic.
The solution is to enter the ICMPv6 IP protocol ID – 58 – into the IP protocol field manually:
After that, ensure that you apply the settings. You can start sniffing ICMPv6 traffic immediately.
On Ubuntu or other Linux distribution, you can easily install radtest using
sudo apt -y install freeradius-utils
After that, you need to create a Router representing your test PC on the MikroTik device so that RADIUS requests will be accepted.
Now you can run radtest like this:
radtest -t mschap [Username of the user to authenticate] [Password of the user to authenticate] [MikroTik IP] 1812 [Router shared secret]
Note the Router shared secret is the password that you used when setting up the Router instance for radtest in User manager -> Routers before and not the router’s admin password etc.
1812 is the default (and recommended) port for RADIUS.
When trying to add for example a router to MikroTik’s User Manager, you see the following error popup:
Initialize the database by using the following command in the terminal:
/user-manager/database save name=""
After that, the database is initialized and you will be able to use it.
In multiple models of MikroTik routers running RouterOS v7.5 I got Error: Connection refused when running simple SSH port forwarding commands such as
ssh [email protected] -L 8080:192.168.178.1:80
but in the RouterLS log I could see multiple local forwarding forbidden error messages:
In this case, the solution was simple: Go to IP -> SSH in WebFig or Winbox and set Forwarding Enabled to Both and click Apply.
If you have already set Forwarding Enabled to Both or Local, on one of my routers this setting wasn’t properly activated – possibly after a RoutreOS upgrade. In order to fix this, set Forwarding Enabled to no, click Apply, then set Forwarding Enabled to Both and click Apply again. For me, this fixed the issue of being unable to do SSH port forwarding.
In RouterOS, you can simply import .pem files using /certificate import no matter if the file contains a certificate and/or a private key.
First, upload them either via WebFig (Files) or via SCP to the filesystem of the Router.
We will assume the certificate is called cert.pem while the private key is called privkey.pem
After that, import the certificate and the private key, one after another:
/certificate/import file-name="cert.pem" passphrase="" name="mikrotik.mydomain.net" /certificate/import file-name="privkey.pem" passphrase="" name="mikrotik.mydomain.net"
This will tell you that first the certificate and then the private key have been successfully imported:
[[email protected]] > /certificate/import file-name=cert.pem passphrase="" name="mikrotik.mydomain.com" certificates-imported: 1 private-keys-imported: 0 files-imported: 1 decryption-failures: 0 keys-with-no-certificate: 0 [[email protected]] > /certificate/import file-name=privkey.pem passphrase="" name="mikrotik.mydomain.com" certificates-imported: 0 private-keys-imported: 1 files-imported: 1 decryption-failures: 0 keys-with-no-certificate: 0
In order to get the current time in RouterOS, use
/system clock get time
The time returned will be in hh:mm:dd format and local time
For example, the following command will print the current time:
:put [/system clock get time]
In order to print from within a RouterOS script on a MikroTik router, use
:put
For example,
:put [/system clock get time]
will print, for example
[[email protected]] > :put [/system clock get time] 22:55:11