Wow, I was just about to ask about this issue and do some research too.
I’ve been burnt before by having RouterBoards configured with meshing not being able to access them once that particular RouterBoard is meshed. I eventually swapped to a routed network but now that’s becoming too much to manage and I’d really like to swap back to meshing.
To answer one of your questions, I have had RouterBoards configured with meshed ethernet ports and it works fine. The meshing traffic is sent with ether types 0x9AAA and 0x9AAB so you can spot it when doing packet dumps. See more under “How to control or filter mesh traffic?” at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Interface/HWMPplus (nearer the bottom).
I have a couple of spare devices handy (a SXT and a OmniTik I think) so I’ll try to make time today to plug them in a do some tests. Setup combinations I can think of now are:
- wlan interfaces meshed only
- wlan and ethernet interfaces meshed
- wlan and ethernet interfaces meshed but the wireless connection broken (I’ll change one device’s frequency)
- ethernet interfaces meshed only
Tests I could run:
- ping after reboot, through mesh starting up and until after connection to mesh (or not)
- arp-ping (never done this before so not sure of its use)
- mac-telnet (same as above)
- ssh
If you can think of any more, reply to this thread (I’ll be notified).
Generally my main concern is the same as yours in that things are great when the mesh is fully working but it’s hard/impossible to connect to devices if they’re configured to mesh but haven’t.