ARP reply couldn't get through

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hello, I’ve set up the network as follow:

Laptop A connects to the router board 133c with cable. Laptop B connects to another router with cable. (just normal router purchased at retail store). The two routers are connected wirelessly.

I run wireshark to keep track of the traffic and I discovered the following: when I ping laptop B from laptop A, an ARP packet was sent to laptop B and laptop B replied with its IP address, however, this reply couldn’t get back to laptop A. I tried to ping laptop A from laptop B also, but same thing happened. It seems to me that the traffic can only go one way. Does anybody know how to fix this? I only setup a bridge to connect the ethan1 and wlan1 of the routerboard. Is this all I need? If not, what did I missed? Please advice.

Thank you very much.

2

It sounds like you have added mode=station to bridge. Note, that mode station does not support bridging due to limitation of 802.11.

  • use WDS, when wireless connection is established between two MikroTik
    routers.
    http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Transparently_Bridge_two_Networks
    client mode=station-wds supports bridging.

  • use mode=station-pseudobridge, that provides almost transparent bridged
    network [it should work fine for one client], when MikroTik router is
    connecting to non-MikroTik access-point.

3

Thank you for your reply. But now I have more questions:

  1. What is station-pseudobridge mode? I couldn’t find it anywhere. Could you please provide me a step by step setup about this?
  2. What do you mean by “it should work fine for one client”? This is only the phase 1 of my project, and in phase 2 we should have several MikroTik routers connect to a non-MikroTik access-point wirelessly. So would the above solution still work? Please advice.
  3. If I use WDS to configure the network, that means I should purchase another MikroTik router and configure it as an WDS access point in order to let several MikroTik WDS routers (in wds station mode) to connect to it, is that correct? Will this solution work?
4

station-pseudobridge - wireless station that can be put in bridge. MAC NAT is performed on all traffic sent over the wireless interface, so that it look like coming from the station’s MAC address regardless of the actual sender (the standard does not allow station to send packets with different MAC address from its own). Reverse translation (when replies arrive from the AP to the pseudobridge station) is based on the ARP table. Non-IP protocols are being sent to the default MAC address (the last MAC address, which the station has received a non-IP packet from). That means that if there is more than one client that uses non-IP protocols (for example, PPPoE) behind the station, none of them will be able to work correctly

  1. Yes, it will work.