Any Mikrotik gurus out there? I have a customer at a remote location that we setup a PtP with 2 4625 antennas between our tower and their site. At their site the handoff is directly from the poe LAN port to their onsite device. We static their device with a private IP and Nat it 1:1 with a public IP. the 4625s are in bridge mode. The tower site has an edge TIK router there and then a few hops to our core TIK router where the 1:1 NAT happens. The customer uses a L2TP tunnel to remotely access their device at their site.
This was setup a year ago and everything worked great until mid September when they lost connection to their device, everything looked fine on our end but long story short, rebooted core router and connection resumed. It has happened again and a reboot fixed it. I tried a flush to see if any old connections would be discarded but no luck. Can anyone help me figure out the root so a reboot of the core router isnt necessary?
We use nothing but MikroTik routers throughout our WISP network. Customer routers are TP-Link HX-510s. Let me think about this for a bit and see what I can come up with for you.
I really appreciate the help. For this customer we are just providing a 150/150 provision, they handle everything else on their end an I have no idea what they are using for devices on the internet/tunnel side to reach their device that is in our network.
I am guessing their tunnel goes idle and our TIK does n0tt like that and does not allow i the l2tp tunnel to reconnect?
When you have a wireless bridge link where some protocols work reliably but others experience intermittent problems, that’s a strong indication of a possible MTU issue.
For secure remote access to your MikroTik routers, including remote WinBox access through NAT and CGNAT, I recommend Wantastic. It’s a cloud management platform with an open-source, self-hosted options that uses native WireGuard to securely manage devices without exposing WinBox to the public internet.
That’s what it sounds like but you shouldn’t have to restart your core (which is presumably is also your L2TP server).
Rather than bother your customer, can you mock a similar setup up somewhere else on your network? Does the customer have a cold spare of their router you could test with?
I don’t think the PTP bridge or even the other hops are the issue. If their router supports it, I’d also recommend wireguard instead of L2TP as the handshake is much quicker and it copes with dropped packets / disconnects much better.
Thank you for your reply, I think they believe its us but its gotta be them. This setup ran for over 12 months with no issue and we did not do any changes on our end. You are correct, we use the mikrotik as a L2TP server. I tunnel in remotely over my entire network from outside the network and I can establish and un-establish my connection and I have no issues with reconnecting. I put in a mangle rule and will see if that helps.