Clients¶
Every device seen on the network, where it is connected, and what it has been doing.
Where the data comes from¶
Clients are assembled on the fast poll from several sources on each managed device: DHCP leases, the ARP table, the bridge host table, and wireless registrations. A single client usually appears in more than one of these, and they are merged by MAC address.
That merge is why a client shows a switch port and an access point: the MAC is known to both.
This can be switched off
Client tracking is the heaviest collector on most fleets. Settings → Polling → Collectors can disable it, at the cost of this page and everything fed by it. See Polling and scaling.
The list¶
Filter by status (online, or all including inactive clients), type (wired or wireless), the device a client is connected to, VLAN, or signal range, in the same filter bar as the device list. Search matches hostname, MAC, IP address and vendor. Refresh, the automatic refresh interval and Purge stale sit beside the page title.
Every column sorts. With Wireless selected, SSID, Signal and Rate replace the Type column and sort too; Signal sorts strongest first on the first click. Rate is the client's current link rate, seen from the access point: TX is towards the client, RX from it. It's also on the client's page, and comes from the newer Wi-Fi package, the legacy wireless driver and legacy CAPsMAN alike.
Active means the client was present at the most recent poll of the device it is attached
to. Clients that disappear are kept and marked inactive rather than deleted, so history
survives a laptop closing its lid; retention_clients_days (default 7) decides how long an
inactive client is kept.
Identification¶
Each client is classified into a category — network gear, server, computer, phone, TV, camera, printer, game console, voice assistant, smart home, IoT — derived from its MAC vendor prefix and hostname.
This is a guess, and it is sometimes wrong. Both the category and the display name can be overridden per client, and an override persists across polls rather than being re-derived. Use custom name for the label you actually recognise the device by; the hostname it advertises is kept alongside.
Client detail¶
Selecting a client opens its own page:
| Section | Shows |
|---|---|
| Connectivity | Where it is attached now, and on which port or radio |
| Presence | When it has been seen, as a timeline |
| Traffic | Per-client throughput history |
| Signal | For wireless clients, RSSI over time |
| Roaming | Movement between access points, with the signal at each |
Roaming and signal history are the two that answer questions nothing else can: a client that keeps dropping is usually either roaming between two APs that both hear it weakly, or sitting at the edge of one.
Signal quality bands are −70 / −55 / −45 dBm. A phone typically drops off a network around −75 dBm, so anything in the Poor band is at or past the edge of usable. Dedicated point-to-point radios are an exception and will read Poor while working perfectly.
Per-port clients¶
The Ports tab of a switch shows who is physically on each port. Uplink and trunk ports are detected automatically — by an LLDP neighbour, by MACs spanning several VLANs, or by a high MAC count — and show an explanation rather than listing every MAC reachable through them. The full table is one click away if you want it.
Actions¶
- Address lists (#145), on a client's page next to its IP address, or the list icon on its
row: the router's firewall address lists, ticked where the client's address is already a
member. Tick or untick, or type a new list name, then Apply. An address can be in several
lists at once.
- Entries a firewall rule added (dynamic) are shown but can't be changed here.
- Lists a firewall rule matches on are marked used by rules. Every change runs through Change Guard, which asks before anything it predicts would lock the manager out.
- If the address is a dynamic DHCP lease, a warning says so: the lists follow the address, not the device. Make the lease static to keep them together.
- Wake-on-LAN sends a magic packet from the MikroTik nearest the client, not from the manager, so it reaches devices the manager cannot route to.
- Notes are free text kept against the MAC.