After enabling multicast-helper mt wireless bridges dont work anymore

Hello,

I enabled multicast helper on capsman to assign vlan tags to clients based on their mac-addresses.

Since then, my two bridges for 2 wired printers dont work anymore (both are mt-devices, wap ac and wap lite)
I just cant get them to work anymore.

They connect but are not reachable…

Wireless mode on the devices is station pseudobridge (its the only one that works at all)

Does anybody have a hint for me? Iam out of ideas.

most likely due to station pseudobridge setting. I believe this is limitation to only passing single mac-address?

if you are bridging MikroTik Wireless devices, use regular AP Bridge and station bridge mode

Info can be found here:

https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes#Mode_station-pseudobridge

Thx, station bridge mode doesnt Seem to be supported with capsman controlled cap :frowning: (why?!)

I will try ap bridge mode and Report back.

Let’s verify the setup:
you have AP, controlled by CAPsMAN. And then you have two wireless (client) devices, both connecting to before mentioned AP, each connecting a wired printer to the rest of network.

I just hope you don’t intend to provision the client wireless devices via CAPsMAN over the very same point-to-multipoint wireless connection those devices have to use to communicate with CAPsMAN? Because this won’t work, CAPsMAN is intended to provision AP devices, not client devices.

Generally AP should be set to ap-bridge mode and client devices should be set to station-bridge mode to create the most transparent wireless bridge between wired parts of your network. Other modes most likely won’t get you there.

I have several Aps controlled by a capsman controller.

Of course, the wireless mikrotik bridges wich connect the wired printers to my network are not managed by capsman. i configured them manually.
yes, my understanding was also, station bridge would be the best option, but unfortunately isnt supported in a capsman managed network.

So it seems its not possible to create a working wireless bridge with a capsman managed vlan network.

thats a bit disappointing to be honest. is there really no way?

Why use capsman to configure ONLY your wireless network bridge?? That is simple enough to do.

use capsman to control your significant amount of AP’s. Anything less than 2-AP’s for CapsMan is silly.

maybe i was not clear enough.

i have 5 aps in my house controlled by one capsman controller.
then i have 2 manually confugered mikrotik bridges, wich each connect to a wired printer.

these bridges dont work anymore after making the setup vlan- aware (enabling multicast helper)

station pseudebridge mode on the bridge devices is afaik the only way the bridges connect at all (but not reachable), station bridge mode is the desired mode for this scenario, but is not supported by capsman.

First of all, why do you care if mode=station-bridge is supported by capsman, when capsman is not used to configure the station?
Second, it is explicitly stated in wiki that for multicast-helper=full station has to be in mode=station-bridge.
And the last, why do you need multicast-helper=full in the first place, what it has to do with vlan-awareness?!

  1. because it seems like a bridge, wich is configured in station bridge mode, doesnt seem to be able connect with my capsman managed network (to be able to connect i think both sides need to support station bridge mode, and since capsman doesnt support it, my caps also dont and so the bridge is not able to connect with my infrastructure. At least this is my theory…)

  2. exactly right, but it just doesnt connect in this mode

  3. this option is necessary to enable communication between wireless clients inside their (with a capsmans acl) assigned vlans, so i have to enable it.

As i understand it Multicast helper turns all broadcasts into unicasts wich is needed to map Wifi clients to VLANs

note this is all my assumptions, i hope i do something wrong here so i can correct it :slight_smile:

Now I get it: it’s not really a bridge, but rather ap - station, when the far end of the bridge is among some other “regular” clients.

That should work if AP is in AP-bridge mode, and station is in station-bridge mode.
Probably it doesn’t want to connect for some different reason?

Two things to try for a possible workaround:

  1. If printer is the only device behind the bridge you can try mode=station.
  2. You can try creating a virtual interface on the AP that will work in mode=bridge and connect to it in mode=station-bridge (but I don’t remember wether is it possible to control virtual APs independently if the master is controlled by capsman).

thanks for the suggestions.

so you think it should be able to connect in station-mode with my caps. then there might be a different reason that it doesnt connect? all i can say it connects no problems with station pseudo-bridge, but after changing the mode to station bridge (everything else stays the same) and hit apply there is no link anymore. i think under registration it seems to try to establish a wifi-link for a couple of seconds and then it disappears and appears again periodically…

As a matter of fact, I was wrong, capsman is the reason after all:
https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes

So the best thing to try is to create separate virtual interface not managed by capsman.

you mean to create a seperate virtual ssid on the cap that will be connected with the station-bride?

Exactly.

iam not shure this is possible on a capsman managed cap ill try.

Im really confused why using mikrotik wireless bridge on your printer(s)???

What about instead using an actual wireless print server adapter?

Provision another SSID on your Caps using CapsMan. Create a new Config.

Then on your station-bridge AP – tell it to connect to that new SSID.

I have had no issues using CAPSMAN, multicast helper, different VLANs and SSIDs with a Mikrotik device in station-pseudobridge mode to connect a non wireless device. The device will be reachable but you won’t be able to connect to the Mikrotik device using Winbox. The MAC shows but connection doesn’t work. You have to connect to the Mikrotik over ethernet if you want to configure it. It’s a shame station-bridge mode doesn’t work with CAPSMAN. Why not?!

Thats strange, maybe i wil show my config later, and something is missing?!

its really strange that station bridge is not supported in capsman since it should not rely on hardware support.