I installed two Mikrotik RouterBoard 750s in my network last week. One of them is NATing my home ADSL connection, the second one is in the Gerecse tower and routes between my home network and the newly installed Pusztamarót Wi-Fi link. Here’s a picture of the two Ubiquity AirGrid M5 HPs on the Gerecse tower used for the HA2NON-HA5KDR and HA5KDR-Pusztamarót links:

The antenna on the left is connected to our APRS repeater. Here’s my current network topology:

I’ve created this graph in The Dude, which is a free network monitoring and management software from Mikrotik. Some items are red on the graph because I’m monitoring a few devices which are not always powered on. The Dude can get device and link status info by pinging, connection monitoring, SNMP or with it’s native RouterOS protocol.

The Dude runs only on Windows, so I’m running it on my Debian server with wine. I simply installed wine with apt-get install wine. To use The Dude, you’ll need a virtual display. After downloading the installer, create one with Xvfb (:5 will be the ID of the created virtual display):

Now you can connect to this display using ssvnc. Check “Use SSH” and enter the host as hostname:5. After finishing installation, you can close Xvfb and The Dude.

Here are the start and stop scripts for the Dude service, and here is the Debian init.d script. To start it at system bootup, copy it to /etc/init.d and execute:

Don’t forget to edit the path of Dude in the start script!