I have an access point (omni 10db antenna, 2.4Ghz band) with aproximately 30 users. Since one month I have problems with interferences and I have decided to change the AP, replacing it with two routerboards and two 17db sectors on each one.
But our CPEs need SSID and MAC of the APs to make the association. Now, there are at least 120 users with these CPEs and you must complain the problem and time required to reconfigure it.
The easiest solution is change the MAC of the wireless cards and put the MAC of the old AP on them. But i think that two wireless cards in one board with the same MAC implies many problems.
Another solution sould be use four RB112 with one sector each and change the wireless MAC for my purposes, bridging ethernet and wireless. But again I don’t know if would work without problems.
…essentially what type of setup do you have? (i.e are they backended to an x86 pc ?) … the best thing you can do in ur case is to get 4 sectors and power them with rbs (for the wireless ethernet side of things) and then tie all them into a switch which uplinks to a core router… It has many benefits… (i.e centralization, increased user capacity…)
…understood. But obviously I negated that option/answering that question under the blatent assumption**** (forgot we are dealing with humans) that one would realize its “unfeasibility” or problematic nature and therefore offered a different solution.
are you forgetting the purpose of a forum?..hmm. (Appreciate and understand/interpret the opinions of others)
You seem like the type to answer such questions as can 1 be divided by zero all day.
Actually for once this is a valid question that does not have an easy answer.
What you provided was good information but has nothing to do with the question.
What you obviously don’t understand is the reason behind the question. If you understood that you would realize that your answer is useless.
It’s a simple matter of staying on topic.
Now, to actually answer the question:
No, you cannot run multiple wireless radios on the same RB and give them identical MAC addresses.
Yes, you could run separate routerboards with separate radios and set them to identical SSID and MAC address. You may have issues with your client devices as they make connect/disconnect and reconnect to a different sector at intervals.
Finally I’m going to use two RB532 with a total of 3 sector antennas and 1 omnidirectional. The radio with omni will sustitute the old AP and I will migrate clients to sectors bit a bit.
Recentrly I made similar transition (changed one AP with two lan cards sticket to the same MT). I did as suggested: placed one temporary omni to be able to accept all users, and I used MAC of old AP on that AP so everybody connected without issues.
Then I moved them one by one to other AP.
I also tried to set the same MAC on both wireless interfaces, and it actually worked. To be specific I did not change MAC of physical interface but I made WLAN’s. It worked, but users kept fliiping from one interface to other, which is not big problem, since you can control which user can actualy connect to which interface.
That is of course not for full time job, but can be used for easy transition.