Beware underscores in SSID!

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hello
Just burned hours of time trying to figure out why my Wifi was bombing out on wifi clients every few mins. Killing teams calls, disconnected for 30secs or so before reconnecting. Im only running a single hapac2 for home setup. Nothing was showing up in logging set to debug\wireless.
Tried following all recommended Mikrotik youtube vids on how to best configure wifi making sure i have the country set etc etc TX gain etc etc :slight_smile:
It seems the reason was me having _ underscores in my SSID!
Renaming my SSID to Mikrotik5 & Mikrotik2 solved all my issues!
Crazy to think.
My SSID has been the same for 15 years with a couple of underscores in rather than using spaces. It was not a problem with my previous routers.
Wonder if Mikrotik should just chuck a little bit of validation in the SSID just to warm if users try to use special chars? Would’ve saved so sooo much time!! I guess I should prob know better… but there you go. Thought i’d post in case anyone else is having similar issues.

cheers

2

Thanks for posting this, but how can you know it was the AP and not the clients that had problems? Perhaps some clients have been more restrictive of what they will accept, after log4j/log4shell could trigger issues on some clients based on the received SSIDs.

If you have been using underscores in the SSID’s for as long as you have owned the hap ac2? What has changed recently on the MikroTik?

Do you still have your old router? Can you verify it does not happen with it?

What clients had the issues? More info is needed to find a pattern. Does it only affect Apple, Android, windows? You can have Teams calls with all three of those platforms.

I don’t have any MikroTik AP’s so, I can’t test, but it will be interesting if anyone else can confirm/deny that it has anything to do with MikroTik.

For reference, what version of firmware are you using on the hap ac2? And did these problems start as soon as you started to use the hap ac2, or just something that happend recently (how long have you been using the hap ac2 for your home router/wifi?

3

Missing also this:
move the _ on another position, to exclude than the problem is the memorized profile inside a device

4

Still keeping _ in the name:
on the affected devices, forget the Wifi networks and connect again.
See what happens then.

5

Years and years ago… There was a “best practices” for wifi written by Apple.

In the SSID it read… “Avoid Spaces and Special Characters”.

I have held fast to this ever since.

6

i think is a good practice for ssid and also in psk

7

The notable exception is setting ssid=“I\E2\9D\A4MikroTik” on our APs :wink:

I gess special characters in SSID doesn’t matter much if SSID is open … with any of encrypted modes it probably does matter though.

8

Ok, I’ll bite… what is so special about it?

9

Try to set it … then use a smart phone to scan for available WiFi networks.

10

OK, I think I get it what should be shown.

For fun, I did try but it doesn’t give the expected result, not on PC, not on Android.

EDIT: Got it !
Using this tool and then doing some CLI magic to set the SSID from terminal.
https://r-1.ch/mikrotik-unicode-ssid-generator.php

Wifiwave2 - hap ac3
Created virtual wifi3 on top of wifi1 and then
/interface wifiwave2 set [find name=“wifi3”] configuration.ssid=“\49\20\E2\9D\A4\20\4D\69\6B\72
\6F\74\69\6B”

AND … it shows correctly on Android, PC and a tool like Wifi Analyzer :laughing:

11

nice

12

Yeah, I ruled out a client issue due to 3 different laptops experiencing the same. Got rid of the underscores, issue went away.
I thought it may be firmware since I was on latest stable. Switched to longterm 7.1 no change.
I think this issue has been there for a while, just in my office I ran a LAN cable to my laptop as I couldn’t be arsed to troubleshoot. I mean on IOS we wouldn’t notice it as much as we dont do teams calls on the phones. Only became an issue when the wife had to WFH due to covid isolation! If the wife is not happy… then I have to do something about it :slight_smile:
Clients are Win10. Been using this awesome hapac2 for about 3 year now..
Would really love to try and find out what is causing the disconnect, but even with debug on the log on the router doesn’t show anything of note.

13

Yeah tried this already, even stripped out the wifi card entries from reg on Win10 laptop. And completely removed driver, re-installed latest to see if that helped, but no bananas!

If I had hours of spare time, I was gonna stick wireshark on the laptop to see if that shows anything..

14

Oh, you’ll have plenty of spare time if your wife keeps being unhappy about WiFi situation :laughing:

15

well, Im at a loss! Wifi drop outs are back! Over it!
Seems may not have been underscores after all. Can’t explain why we had a full day last week without drops after I changed the SSID. GGrrrrrrrr
Now its back with a vengeance. arrrghhhhh
Anything funky obvious in my config anyone can see?

/interface lte apn
set [ find default=yes ] ip-type=ipv4 use-network-apn=no
/interface wireless security-profiles
set [ find default=yes ] supplicant-identity=MikroTik
add authentication-types=wpa-psk,wpa2-psk eap-methods=“” mode=dynamic-keys
name=Evans-LAN supplicant-identity=evans-gw
/interface wireless
set [ find default-name=wlan1 ] antenna-gain=0 band=2ghz-g/n country=
australia disabled=no distance=indoors frequency=auto mode=ap-bridge
multicast-helper=full name=Mikrotik2 security-profile=Evans-LAN ssid=
Mikrotik2 station-roaming=enabled tx-power=15 tx-power-mode=
all-rates-fixed wireless-protocol=802.11 wmm-support=enabled wps-mode=
disabled
set [ find default-name=wlan2 ] antenna-gain=0 band=5ghz-a/n/ac
channel-width=20/40mhz-eC country=australia disabled=no frequency=auto
mode=ap-bridge multicast-helper=full name=Mikrotik5 security-profile=
Evans-LAN ssid=Mikrotik5 station-roaming=enabled wireless-protocol=802.11
wmm-support=enabled wps-mode=disabled
/interface wireless nstreme
set Mikrotik5 disable-csma=yes enable-polling=no
/ip ipsec mode-config
add name=FRBD responder=no
/ip ipsec policy group
add name=FRBD
/ip ipsec profile
add name=FRBD
/ip ipsec peer
add address=au-adl.prod.surfshark.com disabled=yes exchange-mode=ike2 name=
FRBD profile=FRBD
/ip ipsec proposal
add disabled=yes name=FRBD pfs-group=none
/ip pool
add name=evans-lan-pool ranges=192.168.11.51-192.168.11.199
/ip dhcp-server
add address-pool=evans-lan-pool interface=br-lan lease-time=1d name=
evans-dhcp
/queue simple
add name=queue1 target=“”
/routing bgp template
set default as=65530 disabled=no name=default output.network=bgp-networks
/routing ospf instance
add name=default-v2
/routing ospf area
add disabled=yes instance=default-v2 name=backbone-v2

16

Have you eliminated a deauth attack as the cause?

Are you in a wifi-congested area where someone doesn’t like you competing for air time?

I don’t have any good suggestions to prevent it. But if you google for wifi deauth you will see there are multiple publicly available “projects” with instructions for people without much technical skill.

I don’t have any MikroTik wifi products, (only a hEX S and two CSS106-5S-1G switches), but this thread “Management frame protection” - 802.11w compatibility suggests that 802.11w isn’t implemented in v6. This https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/WifiWave2#WifiWave2-Requirements indicates it is available as an extra package in v7.1, but only on a limited number of devices (and the hAP ac2 isn’t one).

Requirements
The wifiwave2 package is compatible with IPQ4019 and QCA9984 wireless interfaces and is only available for ARM builds of RouterOS v7. It also requires 14MB of free space and at least 256MB of RAM.

As of the release of RouterOS 7.1, this means it is compatible with 4 devices:

hAP acÂł (non-LTE)*
Audience*
Audience LTE6 kit*
RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD**

  • The wifiwave2 package is not compatible with CAPsMAN. And does not yet offer wireless meshing (4-address mode).

** The 2.4GHz wireless interface on the RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD is not compatible with the wifiwave2 package. It will not be usable with the package installed.

17

yeah, can only see next doors wifi and pretty sure my mate Johnny is not dauth attacking me :slight_smile:
Im in the 'burbs, so not densely populated.
This morning I read about potential of group key updates. Mine was on 5 mins, so changed that to 22 hours. Not as secure I guess, but no drop outs as yet for 2 hours!

18

It cost me a ton of money and pride to admit it… But Mikrotik wireless is not a useable solution more often than not for our installs

Caps-Man is incredible and flexible. Sadly it is handicapped by controlling Mikrotik radios.

19

Yeah thats the impression Im getting from reading a lot of these posts. Such a shame.
Anyone recommend a decent wifi unit I can buy? Only for home use, so dont wanna break the bank!

thanks all for your replies..

EDIT: 2 days now without a drop. Teams been working like a dream. Although not tested on the missus lappy yet :slight_smile:
Wow maybe I need to change the title of this thread to “Beware group key updates!”