The problem occurs when triing to use wired segments in redundant links with Mikrotik's Mesh. While up to specification it is totally possible: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Interface/HWMPplus.
I've got the following setup: factory consisting of several industrial buildings, lab, office and so on. the distance between buildings is 150-400m (too long for wired ethernet, and the optical links would make some inconvenience in my situation or would cost too much). Each building has it's wired network inside with wireless zones running in 2.4GHz band. The network between buildings, let's call it backbone, is built by WDS/Mesh in 5GHz N/AC (Mikrotik SXT, Groove). Everywhere the Mikrotik machines are used for the network (except some terminal zones). On layer 2 everywhere is HWMP+ instead of Bridge. Up to HWMP+ specification I should be able to build the physical topology with some loops (or let's say disaster recovery paths, which at the sime time will be the optimal paths for some portion of traffic). That's exactly what I've tried to do when my 5GHz backbone (marked with * on drawing) "fed up" with video surveilance traffic - I've added two more SXT's on separate 2.4GHz channel (marked with ** on drawing) between two most active buildings. And here the problem started - perpetuum mobile - they began to generate traffic. All the network fails.
Drawing:
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/wired ethernet / (SXT5Ghz1)-( WDS* )-(SXT5Ghz2) \wired ethernet\
Building1 network - [ROUTER1] [ROUTER2] - Building2 network
\wired ethernet \ (SXT2Ghz1)-( WDS** )-(SXT2Ghz2) /wired ethernet/
So I've decided to try some setups in lab:
Setup 1
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/ -wire- \
- [ROUTER1] [ROUTER2]-
\ -wire- /
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/ (GrooveAC5Ghz1)-( WDS )-(Groove) \
- [ROUTER1] [ROUTER2]
\ ( ~~ WDS ~~ ) /
And some more similar setups. In all the setups ethernet interfaces of ROUTERs looking at each other were added as mebers to mesh, as well as WDS interfaces and ethernet interfaces on wireless devices. In all the cases "infinite loop" was present. I've tried to find any workaround but no luck. The only thing which worked in experimental setups 1 & 2 was changing the type of mesh ports from "auto" to "wds". But it worked only while they were isolated. Once we plug them into the network, everything becomes unstable same way.
It seems to me that there is something wrong in implementation of HWMP+ in Mikrotics,... according to specification, in described cases we should see active-port-type "ethernet-mesh" while we see "ethernet-bridge". If we do something wrong than what? I've tried multiple combinations of settings with no luck.