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MikroTik RouterOS Cloud-hosted router#

MikroTik RouterOS cloud hosted router is identified with vr-ros or vr-mikrotik_ros kind in the topology file. It is built using vrnetlab project and essentially is a Qemu VM packaged in a docker container format.

Managing vr-ros nodes#

MikroTik RouterOS node launched with containerlab can be managed via the following interfaces:

to connect to a bash shell of a running vr-ros container: 

docker exec -it <container-name/id> bash

to connect to the vr-ros CLI 

ssh admin@<container-name/id>

serial port (console) is exposed over TCP port 5000: 

# from container host
telnet <node-name> 5000
You can also connect to the container and use telnet localhost 5000 if telnet is not available on your container host.

Info

Default user credentials: admin:admin

Interfaces mapping#

vr-ros container can have up to 30 interfaces and uses the following mapping rules:

  • eth0 - management interface connected to the containerlab management network
  • eth1 - first data interface, mapped to the ether2 interface of the RouterOS
  • eth2+ - second and subsequent data interface

When containerlab launches vr-ros node, it will assign IPv4/6 address to the eth0 interface. These addresses can be used to reach management plane of the router.

Data interfaces eth1+ needs to be configured with IP addressing manually using CLI/management protocols.

Node configuration#

vr-ros nodes come up with a basic "blank" configuration where only the management interface and user is provisioned.

User defined config#

It is possible to make ROS nodes to boot up with a user-defined startup config instead of a built-in one. With a startup-config property of the node/kind a user sets the path to the config file that will be mounted to a container and used as a startup config:

name: ros_lab
topology:
  nodes:
    ros:
      kind: vr-ros
      startup-config: myconfig.txt

With such topology file containerlab is instructed to take a file myconfig.txt from the current working directory, copy it to the lab directory for that specific node under the /ftpboot/config.auto.rsc name and mount that dir to the container. This will result in this config to act as a startup config for the node via FTP. Mikrotik will automatically import any file with the .auto.rsc suffix.

File mounts#

When a user starts a lab, containerlab creates a node directory for storing configuration artifacts. For vr-ros kind containerlab creates ftpboot directory where the config file will be copied as config.auto.rsc.