Hi,


I'm a beginner and I realize that I can be a bit stressful for you, guys.
As usual I had another problem. The router(RB450G) stopped working 2 times in the last 8 hours, no internet connection, no WinBox access(it said that the request timed out).
I had to unplug the transformer, and then plug it back, in order to make it work again, so I lost the logs, and I have no clue of what happened.

Any ideas on how to start investigating and preventing these type of things?

Maybe I did not secure it well, maybe someone was trying to brute force crack my password, maybe the temp was to high(right now it says 49C, isn't it a bit on the high side?), maybe the supply isn't good enough(the router reports 15.1V, the transformer is pretty HQ, it's from a Canon printer, it's bulky, and it's rated at 1A).
I don't know.....I need your help to find out what happened and to prevent things like these in the future.


[LATER EDIT]: The router keeps on freezing after a while.......in less than 18 hours it froze 4 times....

Are you using some type of backup power supply? I don't have a RB450, but some other RB products do have a challenge with very short power failures and brownouts.

Yes, the transformer is connected to an UPS.
The router was powered(LEDs light up), and it did not respond at all, I disconnected the WAN cable, used another port for the PC, and nothing. I had to turn it off and then back on in order to connect to it.

Are the activity lights on the ethernet ports showing traffic when this happens?

Can you connect to the router using a null modem cable? If the router is still responding at all, it will respond to the serial port. I don't keep the serial cable connected, just when I need to check. You won't get the bootup info, but I connect with HyperTerminal and enter 'admin', and if the router is still responding, it should prompt for a password.

I don't have a serial cable.

It stopped responding again, 10mins ago. (
I didn't check the activity LEDs...

Check the activity lights next time. If they are still blinking, you might want to try connecting by mac-telnet. Do you use Winbox or the CLI to access your router?

I use WinBox.

I use the CLI, so I am going by what I have heard. There is supposed to be a function to search for 'neighbor' routers in Winbox. If the router shows up there, you can connect using its mac address. My goal would be to get into the router without rebooting it. I would want to see the log first thing!

ADD: This covers how to connect by mac address
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Winbox

Yes, but I've tried connecting by MAC address, every time the router froze, from each of the 3 ports that I'm currently using(ether1-WAN, ether2,3-LAN) and I received that "request timed out" error.

Connecting by MAC address saved me in the past(made some mask errors, and could not connect to the router by IP), but not now, when the router freezes.....

How can I save the log even if I unplug the supply? Maybe the log would give me some clues about what is actually happening.

What version RouterOS and firmware are you running in it?

ADD: OS version in "/system resource" and the firmware in "/system routerboard".

RouterOS 4.6

>> system routerboard pr
routerboard: yes
model: "450G"
serial-number: .....
current-firmware: "2.20"
upgrade-firmware: "2.25"

later edit:
uptime: 1h6m28s
version: "4.6"
free-memory: 243732kB
total-memory: 257360kB
cpu: "MIPS 24K V7.4"
cpu-count: 1
cpu-frequency: 680MHz
cpu-load: 8
free-hdd-space: 471608kB
total-hdd-space: 520192kB
write-sect-since-reboot: 81
write-sect-total: 41952
bad-blocks: 40
architecture-name: "mipsbe"
board-name: "RB450G"

You might want to upgrade the OS to V4.10 and the firmware to V2.25

I haven't tried this, but:
/system logging
set X action=disk

Change X to the topics you want saved.

ADD: I recommend changing it back to 'memory' when you find the challenge. The read/write cycle lifetime is much longer on memory.

I have upgraded to RouterOS v4.11 and v2.27 firmware.


I am amazed that this happened because it worked fine for months, and now for the first time, in 14 hours, I got 3 freezes.
The only thing that I was doing in the last weeks was to try different queues and packet marks. I've disabled all of them when it froze the 2nd time and it still froze for the 3rd time, too.

If you were changing packet marks, none affected the routes or firewall, correct? Just the queues?
It could be a hardware failure. If it continues to fail, I recommend contacting your Mikrotik supplier and ask about it.

It froze again.
Orange LEDs both blinking(for WAN and ether2 LAN).
Doesn't connect with WinBox by IP/MAC(it rembembers the last used MAC). MAC doesn't show up/refresh on the dropdown list.

Where can I see the log? I've set "error", "warning", "critical" to "disk", but on the log the last thing that appears is the power outtage(had to plug/unplug in order to reboot).

It will be here. Look for a file named "log.X.txt". The X will be a number.
/file print

It's empty.

I set the topic 'info' to disk for a check, and my log.0.txt contains entries before and after a reboot. Even shows the reboot.

My mistake, I did not set the "info" entries to be written to NAND.

Not a mistake. Just step 1. I used 'info' because there were no other topics that I could create easily. That shows logins and logoffs. I changed the info to disk, then logged out, then logged back in.

I would have checked those had you not mentioned your file was empty, so I went to the logs, and found the only entries I had in the log were 'info'. I wanted to see if the entries survived a reboot, and they do.

I've tried it, too, and it works fine. Info entries appear in the log file.

IMHO, the problem is beyond software, it's highly unlikely that an "info" entry to cause a freeze.

Now it froze again, for the 5th time.....I switched to direct connection.

What shall I do?

If you want to try a backup and reset, then start with a fresh, simple setup and see what happens.
/system backup save name=oldsetup
/system reset

If you want to revert to your old setup
/system backup load name=oldsetup

Problem solved. An update to the NIC drivers was the problem. Uninstalled the NIC, reinstalled old drivers, everything got back to normal. Funny thing is that it worked fine without the router.

Thank you for your support, SurferTim.