To install it on a USB drive is so simple. I know you probably are thinking this will be a long step by step post but I really don't think that is necessary. Do the following and you will be fine.
- Download and install Virtual Box and install if you don't have it already.
- Download the Mikrotik Iso (This is 5.8 at the writing of this)
- Insert USB drive into your machine.
- You will now need to create a virtual machine on your virtual box. Name it "Mikrotik Install" or something along those lines. If you don't know how to use virtual box you can google on how to create a new virtualbox machine. Under the storage options be sure to set the CD to the mikrotik ISO you downloaded.
- Start the VM up.
- You will have to Click on Devices then USB Devices and choose your flash drive on the top menu when you start the machine. YOU MAY HAVE TO JUST RESET THE MACHINE AGAIN for it to see your USB drive.
- Follow through the install and choose the USB drive as the install target.
- Insert the USB into the new machine and boot from USB and tada!
This post was a quick how to I wrote for a friend that asked me to. So it may not be the most precise or clear and I apologize but the theory of it is very simple.
3 comments:
hi,
I'm planning to install ROS on a usb stick or CF card for a x86 machine.
Since your post was in May 2011, how did it perform ? (the usb flash stick)
Do you use a licence ? Is the licence bond to the stick ?
Performance is not hindered at all due to the fact that the OS itself is loaded into memory. The only thing that may cause a bottleneck would be the logging you configure if anything. I can't say for fact, but many products will write the log files to storage media as it can as it flows from memory.
We have a USB install of Mikrotik as one of our edge routers installed on a network with around 3,000 nodes. There is around 50 firewall rules, 30 or so NAT rules, and 10 rules for logging traffic to our main applications that have web access. I think I even have around 400 address-list entries. It runs great. It is almost on par with our Cisco.
The USB flash stick handles it pretty well. We had one die after about a year and a half. I believe that was from an electrical surge though not the R/W's on the system.
As far as the license goes, you will have to have one. $45 should get you there with some old hardware. Which is quite a bargain for a quick router.
You may want to look at Vyatta as well if you don't have preference but just needing a router. Vyatta is very impressive and they have a free community edition. The only thing that sucks with their new distro is they don't have a web gui anymore (which was horrible) so you have to use command line. Very similar to Cisco and we have about 8 routers running Vyatta. We have everything, LoL.
Let me know if you have anymore questions.
Thanks,
Jared
well, i managed to install ROS on a usb stick. First i tried on a 8gb and got errors like 'unable to find kernel'/'kernel panic'
After installing on a 4gb stick, no errors.
I was able to install on stick only if I write the ISO netinstall on a CD, boot from that, and only in that way i was able to see the stick as SATA 1 hdd.
Now, the stick that i'm using was a personal use, mostly for transfering drivers and Hiren's Boot. Hope that this won't affect it's current use (wear leveling).
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