Mikrotik Serial Console Settings

[Coleman John]

TheSerial Console and Serial Terminal are tools, used to communicate with devices and other systems that are interconnected via the serial port. The serial terminal may be used to monitor and configure many devices - including modems, network devices (including MikroTik routers), and any device that can be connected to a serial (asynchronous) port.

The Serial Console feature is for configuring direct-access configuration facilities (monitor/keyboard and serial port) that are mostly used for initial or recovery configuration. A special null-modem cable is needed to connect two hosts (like two PCs, or two routers; not modems). Note that a terminal emulation program (e.g., HyperTerminal on Windows or minicom on Linux) is required to access the serial console from another computer. Default settings of the router's serial port are 115200 bits/s (for x86 default is 9600 bits/s), 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, hardware (RTS/CTS) flow control.

Serial communications between devices are done with RS232, it is one of the oldest and most widely spread communication methods in the computer world. It was used for communication with the modems or other peripheral devices DTE/DCE. In the modern world, the main use of serial communication is DTE/DTE communication (Data Terminal Equipment) e.g. using a null-modem cable. There are several types of null modem cables and some of them may not work with RouterBoards at all.

It allows data-only traffic on the cross-connected Rx/Tx lines. Hardware flow control is not possible with this type of cable. The only way to perform flow control is with software flow control using the XOFF and XON characters.

RouterOS allows to communicate with devices and other systems that are connected to the router via the serial port using a /system serial-terminal command. All keyboard input will be forwarded to the serial port and all data from the port is output to the connected device.

First, you have to have a free serial port, if the device has only one serial port (like all RouterBoards, WRAP/ALIX boards, etc.) you will have to disable the system console on this serial port to be able to use it as Serial Terminal for connection to other equipment (switches, modems, etc):

Note that there are some caveats you should be aware of! Take your time understanding those limits to avoid strange things to happen when connecting a device to a serial port on a RouterBoard:

Having text coming out of the serial port to the connected device might confuse your attached device. Furthermore, in the standard config, you can enter the RouterBOOT menu by pressing ANY key. So if your serial device sends any character to the serial port of your RouterBoard during boot time, the RouterBoard will enter the RouterBOOT menu and will NOT boot RouterOS unless you manually intervene!

Next, you will have to configure your serial port according to the serial port settings of the connected device. Using the following command you will set your serial port to 19200 Baud 8N1. What settings you need to use depends on the device you connect:

This will give you access to the device you connected to port Serial0. Ctrl-A is the prefix key, which means that you will enter a small "menu". If you need to send the Ctrl-A character to a remote device, press Ctrl-A twice.

Routers R1 and R2 are connected with serial cable and PC is connected to R1 via ethernet. Lets say we want to access router R2 via serial cable from our PC. To do this you have to set up serial interface proxy on R1. It can be done by feature called special-login.

I guess you need to add screenshots of what you have done.

The correct gateway id = hardware id was used?

The correct channel plan was used?

Did you add the server you are using to the lora device?

And did you enable the lora device?

LoRa > Traffic: Shows your incoming LoRa packets.

Log: lora-dl: [server_name] Keepalive timed out, could show a possible connection issue (for example)

Also not sure if picking the wrong TTN server is geo-blocked, so be sure to pick the correct server for your region.

First change your network servers setting to ttn-router-us-west. Then read existing forum messages with regards to gateway status at the console and gateways (not) being displayed on maps. The short cut: the console status is not reliable and it takes time before a gateway shows on the map even when you have the privacy settings in the console set right.

That is nothing to worry about. It might be Lora, not LoRaWAN, transmissions or random noise received by the gateway. Every gateway receives packets with crc errors.

The important thing is to not forward those packets to TTN as that will only cause unnecessary load on the shared infrastructure.

I have a caravan setup using Cerbo and wanted to track the van in VRM mostly for security. We have a Mikrotik LTAP Mini router for our internet connection with a 4g connection running all the time. I wanted to send the GPS data from the router to the Cerbo instead of running a seperate GPS receiver mostly due to the fact that the router has a GPS antenna mounted externally, and the Cerbo is down "in the bowels".

I had looked around this forum and elsewhere and did have running a script sending the GPS location to the Cerbo using MQTT and -mqtt-devices however didn't like the complexity of this setup and wanted to do it in a cleaner way.

1. Setup the router - test and then disable the GPS functionality on the router under /system gps. Make sure you get a fix and location data in the /system gps menu then make sure to disable the service so your remote-access service can use the serial port.

2. Configure "remote-access" on the router to the serial port the GPS uses. This website is useful. :Port If using Serial0 like my example you need to disable the system console on this port. Picture of my settings.

Here is my Script, using it for one Year to get the GPS data from another Server which sends it via UDP stream on Port 8500. I did not modify any other Script on the Venus. No Problems at all with the Victron Updates. Now at 2.90-large-beta20. Check if your Server sends the UDP Stream after rebooting.

Thanks, turns out my router (Mikrotik LTAP Mini) switches the serial0 port between a DB9 mounted externally and the GPS port and the only way to specify you want to "switch" to the internal GPS port seems to be to enable GPS on the router making the port unable to be forwarded to a port (TCP in my case). I did have it running possibly by tricking the router into switching over somehow but have not been able to replicate it.

My LTE card also has onboard GPS so im just working through forwarding this to the TCP port and getting a script working. I wish I could use UDP as I think it would be more reliable during a router reboot (I think TCP would fail in this case) however mikrotik does not seem to provide provision for this using the "remote access" tool.

As for the code running on the GX I have it split into two daemontools services, one for the virtual serial port and the other for gps_dbus. I prefer this approach as it blends well with the current services and handles the logging, restarting, etc... I also have a rc.local script that takes care of adding the services back after updates. If anybody is interested I can post the code here.

Thanks so much @Greg , would love to see your GX scripts. Mine currently won't survive a router reboot as the connection is dropped. I had been running a workaround on the latp using my LTE cards GPS.

Hmm, I can't seem to get the remote access for the serial port working. It just says invalid when I attempt to enable it. When I run @Greg 's script it just says device is busy check \port

One thing that is different is I have the LTE version: LtAP mini LTE (R11e-LTE-US)

3a8082e126