General Interface Settings

Document revision 23-Sep-2002
This document applies to the MikroTik RouterOS V2.6

Overview

MikroTik RouterOS supports a variety of Network Interface Cards and virtual interfaces, like VLAN interface, Bridge interface, etc. Current Manual describes general settings for MikroTik RouterOS interfaces.

Contents of the Manual

The following topics are covered in this manual:

Interface Status
Interface Specfic Settings

Interface Status

Interface status can be shown using the /interface print command, for example

[admin@MikroTik] interface> print                                                    
Flags: X - disabled, D - dynamic, R - running 
  #    NAME                 TYPE             MTU  
  0  R ether2               ether            1500 
  1  R prism1               prism            1500 
[admin@MikroTik] interface>

Here, the arguments are:

status - (cannot be changed) shows the interface status. In order to use the interface, its status must be 'Running'.
name - descriptive name of interface
type - interface type
MTU - maximum transmit unit for the interface in bytes.

You can monitor the traffic passing through any interface using the /interface monitor command:

[admin@MikroTik] interface> monitor-traffic ether6
    received-packets-per-second: 271
      received-bytes-per-second: 148.4kbps
        sent-packets-per-second: 600
          sent-bytes-per-second: 6.72Mbps

[admin@MikroTik] interface>

You can monitor one or more interfaces at a time, for example:

[admin@MikroTik] interface> monitor-traffic ether2,prism1                            
    received-packets-per-second: 2         0       
       received-bits-per-second: 960.00bps 0.00bps 
        sent-packets-per-second: 2         0       
           sent-bits-per-second: 2.57kbps  0.00bps 

[admin@MikroTik] interface>

Interface Specific Settings

Specific interface configuration is under the /interface _name_ submenu, for example:

[admin@MikroTik] interface ethernet> print detail                                    
Flags: X - disabled, R - running 
  0  R name="ether2" mtu=1500 mac-address=00:E0:C5:68:11:04 arp=enabled 
       disable-running-check=yes 

[admin@MikroTik] interface ethernet>

Argument description:

apr - Address Resolution Protocol, one of the:

disabled - the interface will not use ARP protocol
enabled - the interface will use ARP protocol
proxy-arp - the interface will be an ARP proxy (see corresponding manual)
reply-only - the interface will only reply to the requests originated to it, but neighbor MAC addresses will be gathered from /ip arp statically set table only.
disable-running-check - for 'broken' Ethernet cards it is good to disable running status checking (as default).

For almost all interfaces it is possible to monitor the interface status, for example:

[admin@MikroTik] interface ethernet> monitor ether2
              status: link-ok
    auto-negotiation: done
                rate: 100Mbps
         full-duplex: yes

[admin@MikroTik] interface ethernet>

Please see the relevant interface Manual for more information.