While it has it’s fair share of bugs (OSPF instabilities in 2.9.x for example), I quite enjoy working with RouterOS. I recently noticed that version 3 sports some “grown up” router features, like MPLS support, as well as some innovative stuff like Xen integration.

Apart from a good CLI interface, RouterOS also has a Windows client application for configuration and monitoring called winbox. A convenient feature of winbox is that you can save device profiles, and optionally store their login credentials. If you want to move these saved profiles to another machine, you can use the Tools->Export/Import function, that respectively writes and reads a binary file called addresses.wbx.

If you’ve forgotten the login password for one of your RouterOS devices, but you chose to have winbox store it, you can use strings(1) to dump the contents of addresses.wbx to retrieve it.

Last week I wrote a little python script called wbx.py that reads this binary format and presents the output in a tabular format that is somewhat friendlier than what strings(1) (or notepad.exe for the unfortunate) would produce. Please be warned though, it’s not well tested, so your mileage may vary.

I’ve added a code page, where I intend to begin collecting any executable bits that I happen to blog about. You can find wbx.py there.