Devolutions Server + Gateway with Mikrotik Winbox
Hello!
We have always been using Devolutions RDM through the years running on a Windows Server which we connected to with remote desktop. Lately we have started looking into Devolutions Server and Gateway in a way to run RDM directly on our local clients, and still be able to access all our customers devices through the server.
I have installed and configured Server and Gateway running on a fresh new database, not to interfere with our old RDM workspace database. I have got it working with a few devices, and now I’m trying to add Mikrotik Winbox devices. I have set up a gateway tunnel object with a TCP-listener like 127.0.0.1:18291 -> 10.0.0.1:8291 and added the Winbox object I RDM as host: 127.0.0.1:18291 and got it working.
My problem is that we have over 550 Mikrotik devices and using this TCP-listener for each object is very tedious. Is there a simpler way to use only one Gateway tunnel object that all Winbox objects inherits? I started to look at using a dynamic port on the TCP-listener like this 127.0.0.1:0 -> 10.0.0.1:8291, but I notice that Winbox cannot pick up the dynamic port at all and fails to connect.
Is there a simpler way to do this?
Also a question, is it correct to set host 127.0.0.1:18291 on the Winbox object? It will look strange for the user but it works. If we could get it to work with 10.0.0.1 I guess the dynamic port with Winbox would no longer be an issue.
All Comments (2)
Hello,
Thank you for reaching out to Devolutions Support.
Regarding your second question, yes, setting the Winbox entry host to 127.0.0.1:18291 is correct. Winbox does not have built-in Devolutions Gateway support, so it has to connect to the local listener that the Gateway Tunnel opens on your machine, which then forwards the traffic to 10.0.0.1:8291.
This is also why the dynamic port does not work. When the listener uses port 0, the port is picked when the tunnel opens, but Remote Desktop Manager currently does not pass that port on to the Winbox entry. For Winbox, the listener therefore needs a fixed local port. Since a TCP forward listener has a single destination, each device needs its own listener.
To reduce the number of objects, one Gateway Tunnel entry can contain several listeners. You could therefore use one tunnel per site or customer, with one listener per router on its own local port, and link each Winbox entry to that tunnel with its matching port.
You can refer to the following documentation article:
I understand that having a single tunnel automatically used by all Winbox entries would be much simpler at your scale. For feature requests, I recommend visiting our forum. Each product has a dedicated Feature Request section:
https://forum.devolutions.net/forums/17/remote-desktop-manager--feature-request
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Best regards,
Jacob Lafrenière
Hi Johan1, thanks for bringing this up. This is 100% something we can improve. In a perfect world, you would only specify the target, pick the Gateway tunnel, and everything else would be configured for you.
Our SSH tunnel already has a "Simple" mode that works exactly this way: each entry keeps its real target, and RDM picks a free local port and hands it to the client when you connect. Note that it goes through an SSH host instead of Devolutions Gateway, so you need an SSH server that RDM can reach and that can reach your MikroTik devices. If you have one, you can use it as an alternative while we work on bringing the same improvement to the Gateway tunnel.