Just got a new chateau 5g and i almost giving up trying to set it up.
cannot make the 5gh wifi to allow connections, can only connect to the 2.4 and the speed is bad. found something on the forum about channels but i cannot select any, tried lower frequencies, nothing. since i came from a really easy interface like tp-link and hoping to learn more about routers, i am now laughing qas i am almost giving up after 2 hours of trying to just make the faster wifi work.
tried severqal resets. clueless. :s
any good tutorial to follow step by and step and understand what is what? so many terms and so many information that uses language that i don’t see in the interface, lol. like “your country might not accept higher channels” but i cannot edit anything in channels, just in frequencies and that is a range. reproduced every single setting from 2.4 to 5 and still cannot connect or when i somehow did manage to do so, no ip…
using pppoe on eth1, no mobile.
PC on eth2 950 Mbps, wifi on phone max 160 Mbps.
Prev router 870 max on wifi 5 GHz
EDIT: this requires the wifi-qcom-ac driver/package (if its really an Chateau 5G) or if its an Chateau 5G ax then you should already have wifi-qcom installed.
Tried that one, found myself having several tabs open to understand what is and what is not relevant there.
Gave up, back in the box, if reset and same settings and only able to use 2.4ghz, I definitely don’t have time in the week to tinker with it. Let’s see what happens when I spend a full Saturday on it. Back to be230 for now, worked fine, I just wanted something with a lot more customization so that I can slowly pick up and learn about networking. I did not expect the learning to be a prerequisite. :S
Maybe I just need to stick with simple wizards for now, and go back to experimenting using virtualized pfsense until I know enough to configure something like this.
Definitely love the product from what I seen, but I am really really far from the amount of knowledge and terminology required to set it up.
Be aware AX device tend to favor higher frequency ranges by default which not all consumer devices can use.
When you are in the settings for that 5GHz radio, go to tab channel and set frequency manually to the desired value.
RouterOS has a very steep learning curve (and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) but once you get how the pieces fall together, it’s amazing what you can do with it.
what exactly do you mean by channel?
on channel i only have “unknown”. nothing can be done there.
channel width tried all combinations of 20/40/80.
frequency tried lowering max range to 5200, even tried setting it to just 5200. (another post talked about channels on similar situations but it seemed to also refer to frequencies).
i have a samsung galaxy s21 ultra that i use for wifi - had no isses with channels and bands on the archer be230 and from what i see they weren’t narrower.
that is why i eventually went for this one instead of using something with openwrt/ddwrt or booting/virtualizing pfsense for the learning.
but it literally kills me that i seem to even have issues understanding all the discussions on channels. way to many detailed settings that need lotsa of reading and way too few tooltips :s
First of all, now I got what you mean by channel tab, I had no tabs, they are listed vertically as expandable groups
Might the latest version to blame there.
And yes in the field channel I only have “unknown”. Anyway. Really didn’t expect to already spend all my afternoon in setting up a new router lol. Really no energy and time for this today. Parked until weekend.
But do let me know what other problem I might have due to that unknown, and perhaps, should I download a different winbox?
this is what i see now.connecting to mk2 works, cannot even connect to mk5. frequency set to 2300-5200, channel width 20/40/80
i can however connect to mk2, 2ghz ax band, 20/40 width, 2300-5200 frequency.
same encryption, same password.
Updated yes as soon as I got the uplink working.
On the logs, might giving me a hand on where they are? I spent the last 6 hours in that interface and haven’t yet found where logs might be… Haven’t even bothered fixing all the LAN dynamic IPs yet since I can’t get the basic wifi working
i am on 7.18
read briefly the link. indeed might help. will park it for today, connecting to an old ap in the other room now, gets the uplink from lan and the speed is there. will spend more time on this at a later day, but i do see some more info in that post you linked. cheers
Turns out, indeed, one of the things I tried doing when unable to connect was pull out the security separately and was overlapping. Got my 5ghz to work now, after resetting completely again.
Now, however I have the following 2 issues, questions:
the 2.4 network is set up to use the same name as the 5ghz one using the wizard. How do I go about ensuring they are separate as the 2.4 is only used for some iot devices (this is where I kept breaking it yesterday, I think, not yet sure). At this moment I am connected, but it seems that I cannot control to which one (max speed in tests alternates 160 to 650). Is there a way to merge those 2 networks and let the router pick the highest possible for device or something? Or how do I go about splitting them without breaking them again?
My home setup has some static IPS and named hosts. Can’t seem to find any list for local DNS names in the interface. Also, tried using pihole, but it doesn’t work in the new network as it did in the previous. IP is static 10.4.20.22 (used to be accessible via white-rabbit.wonder.land - yeah, don’t comment on the Alice in wonderland namings :p). I tried adding the IP as DNS in mikrotik, but ended up breaking the connection. I can reach the server by IP, but since it was the one giving out the names, I can’t reach it by named hosts any more.
Could you give me some links to study for those 2 topics? Getting lost trying to search myself and worried I might fix something and break few others lol
Also, general question…
I seem to find a lot of information in code.
I kinda gathered mikrotik are designed for networking professionals and the consumer market is something somewhat new. I get that and aplaud it.
How much should I expect to do via interface vs terminal and manual configs? Just wanna get my expectations straight as so far it seems I need to drop my “the GUI spoon feeds you the options” approach I had with TP-Link. While they do make great products also, they didn’t allow much control and deep diving into the way it works, hence me replacing a perfectly fine router with a 3x more expensive one just to get exposure to more complexity.
I definitely did get what I asked for, lol.
Also, is there any really good overview on how the setup is broken down? I realized mikrotik doesn’t break down options the same way, and, like the overlapping, conflicting configs, allows setting up same things in separate places.
While my understanding on the topic is low, as I stopped bothering with this 20 years ago when I moved from computer science to business school lol, but given the right building blocks I am quite sure I’ll love mikrotik in the long run.
In regards to the GUI versus CLI: nearly everything can be done through GUI. Personally it depends, sometimes GUI is faster and sometimes CLI is.
On the forum I prefer to use CLI as it is more readable (and you don’t have to make all the screenshots). And, sometimes, the GUI isn’t telling the (complete) truth. Especially the Web GUI and App GUI can cause some problems.
Settings in more places is due to the fact the wifi settings (not sure if this is also the case for other parts of MikroTik) is setup hierarchical. For (former developers this is a blessing, but it can get messy (as settings can be overwritten).
When you look at GUI for Wifi settings it’s rather logical:
In Winbox 3 you have the tabs from left to right.
That’s their priority, from left to right.
In Winbox4 / Webfig sections are ordered vertically, similar logic applies there.
Top down priority.
