CAPs compability issues

There might have been topics around this issue already, I’m aware of that, however I couldn’t find clear answer for my question.

In my network I have collection of several mikrotik devices, variety of architectures (arm, mipsbe, smips) all running stable/lt versions of ros6. Generally, it’s RB4011 acting as a main device in the topology and capsman, whereas other devices are caps. It’s all working pretty well, I have VLANs configured, two wireless networks for different purposes and I’m mostly happy with it. However, some of the devices I have are rather low-end or old. It’s just a collection of devices I acummulated over years and I found good appliance for them thanks to capsman, but slowly I’d like to replace them with newer devices and upgrade to ros7.

Unfortunately, I find it rather non-trivial. Recently I bought hAP ax lite (where minimal version of ros is 7) and to my suprise it was impossible for me to add it to my existing CAPsMAN/CAPs topology at least in a way I’ve configured all other CAP devices. I didn’t have a time to dig in the topic of “advanced wireless networks”, but before I do, I have a general question.

Is it possible to run hybrid infrastructure of ros6 and ros7 mikrotiks acting as distributed network of CAPs at all? As I said, ultimately I’d like to migrate to newer devices and upgrade to ros7, however, given amount of devices I have it won’t happen at once (would be too expensive), so I need to streamline whole process, by replacing CAPs one by one.

Device running ROSv7 version 7.13+ with wireless package installed (ot contains legacy capsman) can act as capsman for both legacy and modern APs. But with a few gotchas:

  • if capsman also has wireless interfaces, then it better requires legacy drivers (generally this means pre v7 device) because drivers from wireless and wifi-qcom packages can’t run a the same time.
  • settings for legacy and new capsman are completely separate … so same things have to be configured in two places anyway
  • and a gotcha without any real consequences: both capsmans don’t interact … but since legacy capsman doesn’t offer any advanced features, such as smooth mobility, this isn’t really a problem

So in short: you can run new capsman on your first v7 ax device and as you’ll replace older APs with new ones, the new capsman will provision all of them. The legacy capsman will eventually end up being clientless (and will die due to boredom).