Best way to provision lots of wAP's

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,
I’m working at an ISP and we’re providing a hotspot service. Currently we are using cisco hardware.

I’ve to provision the wAP ac’s at our stock. Our personal will connect the ap’s to an switch.
What’s the best way to provision the ap’s remotely? With the default config it’s not possible to connect via the ethernet interface. I can’t use the wireless way, I’ve no windows pc where I could run netinstall.
With cisco I use a combination with dhcp, cdp and some scripts and it works like a charm.
Any suggestions?

Kind regards
Felix

2

CDP neighbors show up in the IP>Neighbors screen of Mikrotik routers.

If the Mikrotik has an unused wlan interface, you could probably put the APs’ credentials into the wlan interface and connect to the AP-to-be-provisioned and put a DHCP client on the interface

MAKE SURE TO UNCHECK “USE DEFAULT GATEWAY” and “USE DNS” ON THIS INTERFACE.

Then you could point a dstnat pinhole at the AP’s address and access it remotely that way.

3

Ouh, this sounds a bit fiddly.
I forgot to mention that we are probably gonna use the capsman feature
Currently I have no Mikrotik router at the provisioning station in our stock. I found out that it is possible to connect via ethernet to the wAP if it is started in cap mode. Sadly only one of the wlan interfaces is automatically exported to the capsman. But this seems to be the easiest way to go without the need to configure wifi interfaces.

4

Your initial post led me to believe that you were using Cisco wireless devices.
(I guess once I read “we’re using Cisco devices” - I skimmed over the model being wAP AC)
So my thought was that you had a Mikrotik router in front of Cisco gear and you needed remote access to it.
Ignore my previous post, as it’s completely not appropriate to your situation.

Do you install a capsman controller on-site as well as the wAP AC units, or are you provisioning them to phone home to a centralized unit?

5

I want to use a central capsman controller in our datacenter an let the caps connect to it via internet. At our provisioning switch in our stock i can access them via ethernet.