3 **librouteros** is a library to communicate with *RouterOS*, the operating
4 system of MikroTik's RouterBoards. It uses the *API port* provided by those
5 systems to connect and talk to the devices. librouteros is a low-level library
6 in that it abstracts the network protocol used but has next to no knowledge
7 about the commands and responses available. Should such an high-level interface
8 prove useful, it will be added as the need arises.
13 The RouterOS API uses a simple challenge-response authentication schema using
14 cryptographically secure MD5 hashes. The library used for MD5 computation is
15 *gcrypt*, a cryptographic library originally written for the GnuPG project.
17 ## Enabling API connections
19 API connections (sometimes also called “Winbox connections”) must be explicitly
20 enabled. To do so, issue the following command:
22 /ip service enable api
24 To allow a specific user / group to use the API, the “winbox” item must be
25 added to the user's “policy” in “/user group”.
29 There's currently no mailing list available for librouteros. In case of
30 questions, suggestions and feedback in general, please contact the author
31 directly (see [Author](#Author) below).
36 librouteros is licensed under the terms of the ISC License. Terms of the
37 license can be found in the file `COPYING`.
42 Information about MikroTik and RouterOS can be found on [MikroTik's
43 homepage](http://www.mikrotik.com/). The API documentation used to write this
44 library is available from [the Mikrotik
45 wiki](http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/API).
50 *librouteros* was originally written in 2009 by *Florian Forster*
51 <ff at octo.it> (@octo on Github).
53 Additional contributors are listed in the file called `AUTHORS`.