What I have may be simple, but I am a rookie dealing with routers.

I have a Point of Sale (PoS) machine on the network at 192.168.1.11 that needs to communicate with the fileserver at 192.168.1.10 on the network. How do I set up a default route that 192.168.1.11 sends directly to 192.168.1.10 without broadcasting over 192.168.1.255? The .10 address can get out to the internet, but the .11 address should only be talking to the .10 address.

Also, .11 seems to communicate on ports 137 and 138. Do I need to do anything special to allow this to go through?

Thank You.

If those two machines also are on the same physical network, the two machines will be able to communicate without ever using a router (like your MikroTik), as they are in the same subnet.
So you don't have to configure anything in your router, and the machines don't need a default route for communication with each other.

If you want to restrict where the .11 can "get to", you can use a firewall rule on your router to keep it from going out to the internet. But on your internal LAN (and the same subnet) it will never go to the router, so there's no way to limit anything there in your scenario.

Best regards,
Christian Meis

I should have been more clear.

The .10 is in port ether2 and the .11 is in ether4. This is how they are connected - through the router in the address scheme I have set up in NAT masquerading.

For some reason, instead of communicating with each other, they just broadcast to 192.168.1.255. They won't talk to each other and I don't know why.

if you use configuration bit mask /24 ,that will never work because there is one subnet on two diferent interfaces!that is not posible ,ruting table add two same connected routes ,with same AD ,and router is confused where to send dst packet!

I have the interfaces eth2-eth5 set to bridge mode. So all wired connections are on the 192.168.1.0/24 network.
Do I need to take the two machine network and plug it into a switch and into the router? Isn't there a way to have the ports communicate with each other through the router? It seems silly to buy a switch for two ports when I have four ports on the MT router.

All my wired interfaces draw the masqueraded addresses of 192.168.1.0/24 (with .254 as my gateway). How do I get them wired interfaces - which are already in bridge mode - to talk amongst themselves?

if the two ports are bridged, and there are NO ip addresses assigned to that bridge, it should just work. Also check that you aren't firewalling them. .255 is a normal windows broadcast, there is nothing you can do to stop that. It's doing netbios broadcasts and lookups that way on its own. These should traverse the bridge and hit the other machine fine if there isn't anything firewalling it on the router. If its still not working then post the configs so we can see.

/ip add export
/bridge export
/ip firewall export

Sam

/ip add export

/ ip address
add address=10.5.50.1/24 network=10.5.50.0 broadcast=10.5.50.255 \
interface=wlan1 comment="hotspot network" disabled=no
add address=192.168.1.254/24 network=192.168.1.0 broadcast=192.168.1.255 \
interface=bridge1 comment="Private Network 1" disabled=no

/bridge export

no such command

/firewall export

no such command

If that interfaces is bridged ,no other configuration in needed to comunicate.
Try to remove all masquarade from ip/firewall/nat or export configuration here !

One thing I noticed while watching traffic is that the PoS machine in question (.11) doesn't try to communicate directly with the file server at its address (.10). It sends out broadcast traffic (to 192.168.1.255). Is there something in the Mikrotik stopping the broadcast traffic from going to the file server (.10)? If I have to set up forwarding, what do I have to do?

I have tried to understand the rules in the wiki and the manual, but I am not comprehending what I would have to do.

One thing I noticed while watching traffic is that the PoS machine in question (.11) doesn't try to communicate directly with the file server at its address (.10). It sends out broadcast traffic (to 192.168.1.255). Is there something in the Mikrotik stopping the broadcast traffic from going to the file server (.10)? If I have to set up forwarding, what do I have to do?

I have tried to understand the rules in the wiki and the manual, but I am not comprehending what I would have to do.

The broadcast is an ARP request. It's trying to get the MAC adress of .10 because it's on the same subnet.

You need to create a Bridge and put the LAN ethernet ports you want to communicate together in to that bridge.

/Henrik