Mikrotik as NBN CPE

Tags

Australia NBN, Australia NBN CPE Mikrotik, iprimus, mikrotik, Mikrotik NBN, NBN, NBN CPE

My service provider (iPrimus) provided Huawei CPE (HG659) for my NBN connection. The modem was not bad (I have used it for my old ADSL link) but for some reason it’s not working properly with new NBN connection. The link dropped randomly and it not resolved until and unless I power cycle the modem. Was not even able to ping CPE IP.

I am big fan of Mikrotik and thought I would be great to have MT as CPE.  I bought a MikroTik RB760iGS hEX S. It has decent hardware and comes with 5 Gig ports + 1 SFP port.

All the configuration is straight forward; but only catch is VLAN. iPrimus uses VLAN 100. Below is the Huawei CPE configuration:

Mikrotik ssh key authentication

Tags

mikrotik, SSH, ssh authentication

We can use SSH key to authenticate Mikrotik box.

Step 1: Check you SSH key pairs. We will copy the public key (id_rsa.pub)

bash-3.2$ ls
config id_rsa id_rsa.pub known_hosts


Step 2: Copy public key (id_rsa.pub) to the MT. In this case MT IP is 192.168.99.1 and username is admin
bash-3.2$ scp id_rsa.pub admin@192.168.99.1:/

Step 3: Login to MT and check whether the public key has been copied successfully
[admin@mt] > file print
# NAME TYPE SIZE CREATION-TIME
0 flash disk jan/01/1970 11:00:07
1 id_rsa file 1896 dec/18/2019 10:19:45
2 flash/skins directory jan/01/1970 11:00:08
3 flash/mt-20191217-0031.backup backup 18.3KiB dec/17/2019 00:31:20

Step 4: Now enable ssh-key login for user admin. Run the following command from MT
[admin@mt] > user ssh-keys import user=admin public-key-file=id_rsa.pub

Step 5: Verify it. Run the following command from MT
[admin@mt] > user ssh-keys print
Flags: R - RSA, D - DSA
# USER BITS KEY-OWNER
0 R admin 2048 fakrul@au-mohammad-macbook.local


Step 6: Try to ssh to you MT box. It will ask for passphrase
bash-3.2$ ssh admin@192.168.99.1
Enter passphrase for key '/Users/fakrul/.ssh/id_rsa'