Hi.
What is the difference between station wds and station bridge? I know that station wds is compatible with 802.11 and station bridge is mikrotik propietary but thats not the point. I assume that all hardware is with routeros, so which one will be better? I didnt find clear answer on forum nor wiki.
Thanks in advance for answers.
Anybody?
Every Thing You Always Wanted to Know About Station Modes But Were Afraid to Ask Google:
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes
The basic difference is that the station bridge mode is Mikrotik’s proprietary one.
The wiki should be the primary source of information - clear. However in this thread it’s about reaching out to somebody who could provide advice and give plain feedback based on their experience and observations. Agree with me or not, but that wiki article is too synthetic. I am also curious what are the advantages of using wds mode over station-bridge mode. Are there any specific situations where one would be better than the other? Thanks.
Exactly.
if i understand correctly, the station-bridge it’s the layer 2 setup.
and for the station-bridge setup, the setting is more simple than the station-wds.
OK, I personally use EoIP tunnel instead of wds bridge or station-bridge. Mainly it is due to some historical reasons - the station-bridge was not available these days and I saw too much articles describing problems with wds (so I have a psychic block to use wds probably).
The EoIP was able to create fully transparent bridge so we are using it. Although the EoIP has some disadvantages too. At the first it eats some CPU cycles (we are using RB4xxAH mainly). The tools / profile shows some minor CPU usage (several percent) but BW test shows bigger difference (higher througput without EoIP). Another problem with EoIP is Mikrotik’s poor mechanism to assign automatic MAC addresses. Which causes collision of MAC addresses (MT box reboots and starts to use another MAC address on EoIP which collides with another address in the broadcast domain. Strange thing is the MAC address is a part of the stored cfg of EoIP so it couldn’t change). Fortunatelly the problem demonstrates itself rarely.
I tested station-bridge - it works (I am still using it one 2 or 3 links and on some AP clients which have to server multiple MAC addresses and the AP is usig NV2 so I cannot create virtual APs) and it is easier to configure (no IP for EoIP tunnel etc). But big disadvantage for us is that once you change wireless mode from ‘station’ to ‘station-bridge’ (it may be tru for wds mode too - I never tested it), you are not able read RX signal level from the station easily. In the station-bridge there is a table of connected APs in the station MIB so you have to walk through the table to read the values. And the list of values contains different ones. In plain ‘station’ mode you can easily ask one OID to get link RX signal (there is no easy way for TX signal - which should be read from AP walking its registration table).
So since the link SNMP reading of RX level of links is very important for us and Mikrotik’s didn’t offer a way how to create graphs from links using bridge mode we are still using EoIP which allow us to have graphs of RX level and we can check them to see how the signal evolves in time.
So what is better for someone would be worse for you. You have to decide what you will use. If you use only Mikrotik’s devices you can use station-bridge (or EoIP). If not you have to use wds.
to read the tx/rx signal in the station-bridge, the version have to 5.20 and above.
but the old mib file oid is not function, so you need to use…
interface wireless registration print oid. then use the oid you can get the tx/rx reading.
the problem is that the oid is part of a table. And the table is indexed by remote side MAC address. So the MAC address of the AP is part of the OID. It means for each radio link the OID will be different. And every time you change the APs MAC address you have to change the OID in your SNMP data collecting system. You can live with it if you have several links. In our case we read data from big amount of radios and we use a template for each type of radio. We should create a template for each link - it is not possible/comfortable.
Unless MT’s do some change in the MIB (the client side has no need to use table for remote partners data - it can connect only to one AP IMHO - the ‘station’ mode does it this way) we have to walk through the table - which I hate because it is slow process which requires multiple SNMP request.