Winbox is a Utility made by MikroTik, allowing us to connect to the MikroTik router to make configuration on it. You have to think it is like “Webfig” but without using the web interface, instead we use the Winbox utility.

I can say that 99.9% of MikroTik engineers use Winbox when they want to configure MikroTik routers, so you will be very familiar with Winbox, and you will be using it all your life. In this book, all configurations from now on will be used on Winbox.

How to use Winbox? How to connect to the MikroTik router with Winbox when we do not have an IP address? How Winbox looks like? All those questions will be answer in the upcoming LAB.

LAB – Winbox

We are still on the same LAB scenario, and everything is still connected as per the picture below:

Of course, we do not have an IP on the router. We need to connect to the router, which doesn’t have any configuration on it, so we can start doing some configuration.

The 1^st think I need to do is to download Winbox software from MikroTik website. Let’s do that right away.

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Once Winbox is downloaded, you will have on your PC

Just double click on it, then it will be opened for you. Then all you need to do is to click on “Neighbors”

Once done, you will see the MikroTik router on the showing up as a neighbor. It will have 2 entries because the router has IPv6 enabled, so it shows an entry of IPv4 and another one for IPv6. What is important for us is the 1^st entry. You can see clearly the MAC address of the router, and the router has no any IP address (0.0.0.0), the version of the RouterOS installed on the router, the type of the router and its uptime.

The nice thing with Winbox is that even if the router doesn’t have an IP address (so Layer 3), you can still connect to it on its MAC address (so Layer 2). Of course, it is ideal that you connect to the IP address because it is Layer 3 and more reliable, but if you fall into a case like what we have now with a router not having an IP address, then you can connect to its MAC address.

Let’s connect to the MAC address by clicking on the 1^st entry in the Neighbors, we put username admin and the password we keep it blank.

We just entered to the router. We are required to put a password, so I will use a simple password of “123456”

Now that we are inside Winbox, we can set an IP on the interface Ether2 of 192.168.88.1/24 and will put an IP on my PC of 192.168.88.2/24 so it can have communication with the router on Layer 3, then will try to open Winbox on Layer 3.

But before I do that, I just want to show you that this router has absolutely no any configuration on it. The easiest way to do is to write “export” on the command line then we can see that no any configuration is on the router. Let’s do it.

You can see clearly, no any configuration is set on the router.

I will proceed by putting an IP of 192.168.88.1/24 on Ether2 of the router:

Please be careful to put the /24 after the IP address. If you do not do that, the router will not notify you that you made a mistake because MikroTik accept a /32 IP address, but you will not be able to reach the IP from the PC.

Now that we have put the IP on the router, I will put an IP on the PC of 192.168.88.2/24

Excellent. So now the router and the PC have IPs from the same range, let’s ping from my PC to 192.168.88.1

It is working, great.

1 more step before we finish this LAB, I want to connect to the MikroTik from Winbox but this time on its IP address. Let’s try that.

Here we go. I could connect to the router from Winbox on its IP address without any problem.

That’s all about this LAB. In the upcoming topic will speak how to connect to the MikroTik router via the Command line in case you prefer to configure the router via the command line.

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