CAPsMAN with Wireless Repeater

RouterOS General
1

Dear Community,

Right now I have a second router (RB751) configured as a Wireless repeater. Basically the range for handheld devices are great this 2.4GHz based repeater is only needed for IoT devices cause they have a really low range.
I wonder if I can set this up (the second AP only has one wireless interface, this is used to connect to the main router and also to broadcast - in my knowledge this is how usually simple repeaters work) as a CAP and control that AP from my main router. If yes how? Does this makes any difference between setting it up for a device which has at least two interfaces (one to connect to the router) and the Wi-Fi is a dedicated ap?
It would be great if I can see where each device connects, without connecting to the AP directly.

Thanks for helping me out in advance!

2

I have found this presentation which seems to do the same (even RB751 is the same :smiley: )

https://mum.mikrotik.com/presentations/MN17/presentation_4441_1497864498.pdf

But I might want to get some infos from you, if this is really possible and it would work similar as now (but I would be able to manage it from the router).

3

I have tried setting up this way, but I lost access to the AP.
I don’t know what I did wrong, it would be great if somehow I could use CAPsMAN as I would like…

4

This is my current caps-man config on the manager:

/caps-man channel
add band=2ghz-g/n control-channel-width=20mhz frequency=2422 name=channel_2ghz
add band=5ghz-a/n/ac frequency=5500 name=channel_5ghz
/caps-man datapath
add local-forwarding=yes name=datapath1
/caps-man security
add authentication-types=wpa2-psk encryption=aes-ccm name=security1
/caps-man configuration
add channel=channel_2ghz country=hungary datapath=datapath1 hide-ssid=yes installation=any mode=ap name=config_iot_2ghz security=security1 ssid=atlas-IoT
add channel=channel_5ghz country=hungary datapath=datapath1 hide-ssid=yes installation=any mode=ap name=config_iot_5ghz security=security1 ssid=atlas-IoT
/caps-man manager
set enabled=yes
/caps-man provisioning
add action=create-dynamic-enabled hw-supported-modes=gn master-configuration=config_iot_2ghz
add action=create-dynamic-enabled hw-supported-modes=ac,an master-configuration=config_iot_5ghz

What I don’t know is that I want to use cap on virtual interfaces only. What will happen if the master interface (of that virtual interface) don’t match the configuration above (like channel or anything else which can’t be changed in a virtual interface)?
I’m afraid that’s why last time I got locked out from one of the APs and unfortunately it seemed that even Safe mode did not helped to revert to a working state.
Right now this capsman config matches the current config of each individual AP, so it migh work like this?

5

Well it seems you can’t run CAPsMAN on virtual Wireless interfaces… and also you can’t create station config in capsman…

6

CAPsMAN needs to control whole wireless interface (physical/primary and virtual APs). With setup wanted by @OP there’s a typical chicken&egg problem: device needs primary wireless interface up&running to connect to CAPsMAN so CAPsMAN can not really configure that interface anymore.

So no, what @OP wants to have (wireless repeater, controlled by CAPsMAN) doesn’t seem to be possible. It would be possible to do it on devices with dual wireless interfaces so one would be used for uplink (configured locally on the device) and connectivity towards CAPsMAN, the other interface could be then configured and provisioned via CAPsMAN.

7

maybe with eoip tunnel to repeater?

8

It doesn’t really matter what kind of interface links CAP with CAPsMAN (well, it has to be L2 transparent), but it has to use physical interface different than the one being provisioned by CAPsMAN … which pretty much rules out typical wireless extender case (where same physical interface both connects upstream to AP and offers signal to wireless clients).

9

Thanks, yes this is what I thought also, so thanks for confirming this!
I think I will use another router with multiple wifi interfaces so that I can use CAPsMAN fully.

And what about controlling local wifi interface? I have several virtual interfaces also, it is possible to setup multiple interfaces through capsman?

10

It is possible to run multiple virtual wireless interfaces on top of single physical interface with CAPsMAN just like it’s possible with local configuration. In provisioning part, use comma-separated list in slave-configurations= property.

The only gotcha with CAPsMAN is when one wants to configure wireless interface using CAPsMAN running on local device. But it’s possible, search forum for sollution.

Come think of it (but never tried myself): would it be possible to provision CAP radio with only slave configuration? This would then make it possible to (partly) control wifi repeater using CAPsMAN …

11

Thanks I will try. But again, if selecting the physical interface to control from CAPsMAN, this will not mean that it will ignore the local configuration even if there will be only slave configs?
Also I don’t know how to setup this. Select the wlan1 interface as a CAP and also select wlan1 as a discovery interface?

12

My guess would be this: on CAPsMAN set it like this:


/caps-man configuration
# don't add anything HW-speciffic in this part, such as channel or country or ... only high-level config
add name=vAPconfig security=wpa2psk ssid=guestSSID
/caps-man provisioning
add action=create-dynamic-enabled radio-mac=<MAC address of CAPs wireless interface> slave-configurations=vAPconfig

This will instruct CAPsMAN to provision only slave interface on CAP and (hopefully) leave master interface intact (and that interface is locally configured as station of your main AP).
You can leave off the radio-mac= setting if it’s OK that all CAPs get provisioned the same way (making it default setup).

On CAP the corresponding config might be something like this:

/interface wireless cap
set bridge=bridge interfaces=wlan1 discovery-interfaces=wlan1 enabled=yes

I guess bridge=bridge setting only matters if you actually use local forwarding (set on CAPsMAN in /caps-man datapath), otherwise I guess bridge= setting is taken from datapath definition on CAPsMAN.