we're starting a series on micro tech routers these are a disruptive technology in that they provide features that are only available generally on the market as enterprise level features so you've got to pay a lot of money to get these kinds of features well these little guys from mikrotik are able to do it a lot cheaper we're talking about 10% of the price so it is a great thing and it allows us to create a better home network a better office network perfect for SMBs or self-employed people so if that is you or if you just want to make your home network as good as can possibly be well this series is for you we're gonna take you through I'm going to take you through everything from the basic setup today all the way to creating a guest Wi-Fi network that is going to allow your kids friends to use the Wi-Fi without actually risking the integrity of your personal data there's a lot that we can do with a mikrotik router and we're gonna help you through that throughout the course of this series the series is available at cat5 dot TV slash mikrotik so make sure you go there and you're gonna see each of the videos plus the hardware that is going to be required speaking of hardware now I have opted for the micro tech cap AC router board RB 9 6 2 UI GS and the reason that I've opted for this particular model is well there's a few different things essentially it has Gigabit Ethernet now my internet here at the studio is gigabit internet so if I had a router that only did 10 over 100 I'm gonna actually only be getting 100 megabits per second on my internet service even though it's capable of so much more so I absolutely needed to ensure that my router is going to support the Gigabit Ethernet so that and the gigabit internet so that I'm not losing some of the speed of my internet connectivity that's very very important second to that is the fact that it has a dual radio so 2.4 and five gigahertz Wi-Fi so I can put my cameras on 2.4 gigahertz which is a pretty oversaturated band but at the same time I can have five gigahertz for my phone and my other devices so that I've got better speed better connectivity and it's going to work really really well it supports 802 11 B G and n Wi-Fi capability all from within this little device that is not going to cost us a whole lot of money you can find out more about the product line go to our website cap five dot TV slash mikrotik and follow the link and that's going to take you to an index so what is interesting I should say I've already kind of covered this in the introductory video a couple weeks back but just to be clear what is neat about mikrotik is that it is not limited by software so the firmware of the router does not restrict you in the same way that a traditional consumer router would typically you have to pay more for more features well mikrotik and their router board OS if they it is completely wide open as far as features Heco's so the only consideration as you buy a micro tech device is what is the hardware going to do for you so you need to make sure that it's that the device that you're buying is going to meet your needs is this the right device for you I don't know you may be able to get away with a lesser one something a little smaller a little bit a little less expensive and and you can go through the list of their hardware and figure out which one is right for you but keep in mind the software that runs it from the very cheapest thirty forty dollar router that mikrotik makes all the way up to the very most beautiful rack mountable six hundred dollar unit the software the firmware the capabilities of the programming are completely the same so the only limitation is based on hardware so you can start off with something really cheap and work your way up later you can upgrade if you need something better that's pretty cool so again cat5 dot TV slash mikrotik the now all that I've done is plugged in the power so far but what we need to do first and foremost is I need to bridge my internet modem so my internet service provider has provided an internet modem that allows me connectivity but that modem has a DHCP server it has a firewall and it's basically allowing my computers to communicate to the Internet well I'm gonna replace that built-in firewall in that built-in router with and the DHCP server with my mikrotik so I need to do what's called a bridge so the modem that my ISP provides mine is a hITRON modem I need to set it so that it is nothing but a modem and then we're going to use this device to control it so the way I'm gonna do that is I'm gonna log into the interface and the hITRON modems rcus admin is the login your modem is going to be different so do keep that in mind it's gonna be the IP address of your gateway you can find out more by contacting your ISP if you're not sure how to do that but just ask them hey how do i bridge my modem that's the important thing so it is just gonna be a dumb modem that gives my mikrotik access to the Internet so on the hITRON I'm gonna go into basic and then gateway function and residential gateway function is enabled by default I want to simply disable that now keep in mind as soon as I say okay I'm gonna lose access to the Internet once I hit Save Changes so let's do it because now I have turned that into a dumb modem so let's grab an Ethernet cable and let's let's uplink our router board so the router board port number one I'm going to set as my LAN port so I'm gonna connect that into my network just get this out of the way this is a little bit rickety because I'm doing this you know pretty makeshift but you're gonna get the idea basically port number one from the router board is going to come out to my my modem so I'm gonna plug that in to my modem here there we go connected and good let's see yeah doesn't seem to matter which port I go in I'm gonna just jam that in there there we go and now I'm gonna take the cable that was up linking me to the network and I'm gonna plug this into port number two on my router board and that's going to give me access to the micro tech I say router board mikrotik is the brand router board is the product so my network which is my switch is now connected to port number two so my computer is basically seeing port number two port number one on the mikrotik is going into the back of the actual ISP modem which is now set to bridged mode so let's jump over to our mikrotik first of all we need to see what's now one thing you're gonna notice is that I am at 10.00 dot to find out what my new network is now that I am on the micro tech ipconfig /all so this is in Windows in Linux you're gonna type IP space dash a and let's find out what kind of networking I've got here okay I'm still seeing a default gateway of 10.0.0.0 it has not refreshed yet so well let's check so I'm on Windows 10 and even though a reboot could trigger basically fixing your network by trying to reconnect all I'm gonna do is I'm going to right-click on my a thern ed adapter and disconnect disable the Ethernet adapter and re-enable it and now once it reconnects I should be able to do an IP config slash all and should see yes okay so we now are on 192.168.1 so let's try that 192.168.1 and there we are with router OS so in retro ass first thing we with now this is the quick-set so this is allowing us to quickly set up our mikrotik router device so let's see what's happening here so DHCP server range I want to change that to 10.0.0.0 to 10.0.0.0 for now you may not need to do that because you may be using 192.168.1 - I here at the studio I use the 10.0.0.0 block so that is general networking and not really what I'm setting out to do here and and teach you but essentially that's my IP block if you're happy with 192.168.1 that's fine I'm doing 10.0.0.0 my router and setting the DHCP server range accordingly from one hundred to two hundred and fifty four all right so anything else that I need to set here I can set up my wireless and everything else I'm gonna do that in a little bit so let's just get our IP address working here so I'm going to hit apply configuration notice the address acquisition is grabbing from Ethernet port number one that's why I plugged my modem in there and I've set it to automatically get the IP address so let's see what happens here as as I apply that configuration so we should see that that router is going to restart itself and when it does we're gonna be on a 1000 that work cheap and cheerful solution alright 10 dot 0 dot 0 dot to to get everything set up okay so let's let's renew our DHCP from this is our internet connection let's see what it's given us let's release and renew make sure yes we are on Ethernet port number one I do not have a live indicator light so something my cable wasn't plugged in all the way ah that is thing number two to do so do you see how that just popped right in boom I am live on the internet so now I should already have access to say Google yes I am online let's do a quick speed test let's see how she's doing go-go-go so that was a pretty miserable download speed upload speed not terrible test again something's up there maybe we're just in that you know that pandemic internet speed everything is pretty slow right now yeah getting pretty low speeds so even still a 10 over 100 router would only give me up to 100 megabits and I'm pushing 156 right now that's pretty bad considering I'm supposed to have a gig but at least I know that I'm getting better than 100 megabits a second so there we go everything looks pretty well set let's jump into web Figg now this is what makes the mikrotik so very powerful this is the software which you will get lost if you try to find your way through here and note that that's as quick as it was to get everything up and running but I am going to need to set up things like under IP I can set up DHCP reservations so as my devices connect I can actually set these up as static devices you'll notice it's counting backwards so my computer actually got to 54 so it's actually starting at the high end of the DHCP pool and working its way down which is fine if I wanted to I could make that static by simply clicking on make static again I'm an IP dhcp server i've single clicked on my computer and i can click on make static i'm not gonna do that but i will need to do that with things like my server when i bring those online so that is really like really cheap and cheerful quick setup of my network now let's actually get Wi-Fi up and running so Wi-Fi is pretty straightforward i'm going to add a Wi-Fi password of dum-dum 1 2 3 don't actually do that I'm doing that for the sake of the demonstration okay so network name on 2 gigahertz I can leave it as is or I can say cat 5 TV 2 point I guess I can't I'm not sure if I can have a point in there or not I'll go cat 5 TV and then for 5 gigahertz I'll go cat 5 TV 5 gigahertz yeah alright so see the options here bheegi bheegi n b GN GN and then we've got a n/a n/a n/a only AC and n with a see there's my password okay so looks good apply that configuration now one of the things that's really really neat about this okay first of all you notice I'm not having to reboot my router every time and notice I'm starting to pick up some Wi-Fi connectivity here I don't have to reboot every time I change the configuration and when I create any kind of config it's instantaneous so but what is cool about web fig this web interface so notice I'm accessing this through the IP address of the router is that if I were to brick my mikrotik and I don't want to lose the settings that I've created how presumably you've backed them up because you can within web fig that's part of the system so if I jump into that do you I want to say it's in system system to do recent reboot ports see how fast this is I will find and cover backing up your micro stick oh there's a sub out dot riff file so that will do it but if you were to cause a problem that would not that would make it so that you cannot log in to this mikrotik provides a piece of software so I've just logged out and you can down and install wind box wind box is a Windows application it's also available for Mac and it gives you the interface it basically detects your router on the network and it gives you the same interface with a little more functionality like micro multitasking but even if you cannot get into the web interface you can use wind box I say it's a Windows application you can download it and run it in wine on your Linux box so do not be concerned about that notice I can login with no password so I want to go into quick set and just set myself password on my router dum-dum 1 2 3 dum-dum 1 2 3 and apply that config and so now if I log out and try to log in again its gonna say authentication failed so I'm going to try dum-dum 1 2 3 enter make sure you use smart passwords ok folks best way to do that is use a tool like like LastPass and generate a secure password ok grab that make that your password and and then use LastPass or whatever password manager you're using in order to memorize it and that's going to keep you a lot safer of course the interface is only accessible within my network so it can be something that's familiar to you as well so that is so we've got Wi-Fi working presumably so let's see if I bring up my phone here and drag down let's bring up our Wi-Fi networks and you will see cat 5 TV 5 gigahertz is there and ready for me to connect I'm going to try it connect to it and type dum-dum 1 2 3 connect and obtaining IP address and I'm in done and it's detected cat 5 TV the 2 gigahertz as well and I'm connected so now if I go I pee and then DHCP server and go into my leases you'll see that there's a new device that's my phone so I can make that static and I can and notice that is the polka phone polka phone f1 Robby so it's as quick that to pick things up be able to configure it and literally we we just set up our internet and got up and running in a matter of minutes what are we gonna do for the rest of the show folks what are we gonna do so check out cat5 dot TV slash mikrotik these devices are affordable they are powerful we're gonna learn all kinds of amazing things that we can do with this it's so much better than the built-in firewall and protection that comes with your ISPs modem it removes the ISPs ability to be able to connect in and access your network that's important think about that for a second when you install a a modem from your ISP your internet service provider they have access to that remember when I bridged it that made them lose access to it now the only device that they can see if they're trying to track is the the mikrotik they cannot access it however they might be able to see just that there is a device connected I could connect another hundred computers they would still only see one device connected so it gives you a fair amount of privacy against the ISP snooping as well and that said it's giving you a huge amount of privacy against script kiddies and hackers and everything else but at the same time we're gonna be able to create a safer network within our internal infrastructure which is going to be fantastic I mean it's so nice to be able to give out a Wi-Fi password to your friends and family as they come and visit but you don't want them to have access to the files on your server to your printer to using all your bandwidth as you're trying to you're trying to do something online and something's weird it's running so slow well little did you know that somebody who you gave your Wi-Fi access to is downloading a movie from next door right so these are things that we're gonna be able to prevent with our mikrotik so check out the series cat5 TV slash mikrotik it's gonna be amazing and we're up and running I'm gonna put this in the rack and I'm excited because this is a way better solution for my network [Music]