I am having issue with VPLS tunnel crashing.

I use VPLS tunnel between APs and Gateway Router. Some tunnels pass through several wireless bridges to get back to gateway. Sometimes, wireless bridges become unstable for short amounts of time, probably due to interference etc. Sometimes when a bridge goes bad, VPLS tunnel drops (this is expected if the bridge is not working of course) the problem is that sometimes the VPLS tunnel reconnects fine and other times, it causes the RB411ah to go into some kind of loop. RB411 is accessible outside the tunnel, but in windox, interfaces do not appear, there is nothing listed in VPLS, CPU is at 100% and if I run tools- Profile it shows ROUTING as the main CPU user. The only solution seems to be to reboot the 411 which usually takes much longer than usual and then once rebooted, everything returns to normal.

So of course the solution is to ensure the wireless bridges back to the gateway don't stop or have issue, but this would only work in a perfect world. Second solution is to understand how to make VPLS reconnect without causing RB411 to crash.

I used to use EoIP Tunnels, but need the additional bandwidth VPLS can provide.

One thing I notice with EoIP tunnel is that the interface shows as registered as soon as you add it to the RB even if the tunnel is not connected, so they do not seem to need the other end to be registered, where as the VPLS needs confirmation from the other end to register.

Any suggestions?

THis crash seems to be fixed in v6rc6. If you do not want to upgrade to RC version then you can try to disable LDP and use BGP based VPLS and TE tunnels for label distribution.

Will the fix be released in any 5.xx version? I am using 5.22 and am leery of moving to 6.x until it is at least confirmed stable.

I have never used BGP/TE is there a tutorial anywhere?

Yes there are several examples in the wiki
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Simple_TE
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:TE_Tunnels
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:BGP_based_VPLS

See all mpls related articles here
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Category:MPLS

Would I need to upgrade both the AP and gateway to v6 or might only upgrading the AP solve my issue? I wouldn't mind upgrading an AP to see if it works, but the Gateway is too important to "test" RC versions on.

Also, you didn't answer my previous question.. any chance of a v5.23 with the VPLS fix???

You can upgrade only the router that crashes. Maybe other router will not crash.

I cannot say 100% for sure, but most likely fix will be only in v6.