Am confused by the issues surrounding upgrading past 7.13 and the wireless packages. I understand “wifi” is now included and preferred to replace “wireless”, but this causes some issues.
On my ac2 I currently have 7.12.1 and I have some vlans set-up under “wireless”. If possible I will worry about that later.
When one uses ROS built-in upgrader, then the state of device will be retained as much as possible. This means that if you’re currently not running wifiwave2 drivers, then it’ll install wireless package (not wifi-qcom-ac). Hence your device will continue to operate very similarly to what you have now. If you decide to switch over to wifi-qcom-ac, you’ll have to install it manually (subsequent invocations of ROS built-in upgrader will observe this though) and you’ll have to manually configure wifi (neither installer nor upgrader tries to migrate wireless config to the new driver set).
It seems that MT managed to reduce wireless driver set enough making upgrade from 7.12 to 7.15 safe. I’m not so sure about wifi-qcom-ac, it used to be similar size as wireless, but nowdays it seems to be a bit larger. So YMMV.
Upgrader will, in principle, (gracefully?) fail if the space is too tight for installation of upgraded version, and will emit a message about it in the logs. Things get “interesting” if the space after upgrade remains to be tight and ROS, due to configuration, writes things to flash (e.g. address lists with non-dynamic entries, device stats, etc.). In this case flash space may get exhausted and after that some random nasty things can happen.
My rule of thumb: if flash free space falls below a couple of hundred kB, then it’s time to be concerned.
Is there any documentation w.r.t. transitioning a simple set-up from “wireless” to “wifi” ?
A lot of what I found in searching was talking about capsman but I just want to set-up my single device.
Particularly with regard to vlans - although I just use them to have 3 access points, 2 extra for ‘guest’ and internet-blocked networks - maybe there is now a better way to do this.
Portions of wifi are now part of core package (CAPsMAN in particular), hence the presence of /interface/wifi. If you want to replace (legacy) wireless with (new) wifi drivers, then you have to get wifi-qcom-ac package (from extras archive, get it from https://mikrotik.com/download ), upload it to device, mark wireless package for uninstallation … and reboot device.
As you may have noticed already, the new wifi driver has configuration in different part of configuration tree. So before replacing wireless package, do configuration export: open terminal window and run command
then fetch the resulting file to your management machine. Open it with your favourite text editor and use contents as reminder of how your old config looked like.
After you install wifi-qcom-ac, you’ll have to configure it manually. There is no official guide on configuration migration, but you may want to check this thread: http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/migration-guide-from-interface-wireless-to-interface-wifi/172028/1 … you may get some ideas from there.
As always: when everything else fails, come back (with your at that time actual config) and we’ll try to help you.
There is a lot of documentation on the whole topic regarding new drivers. But no one seems to read. So please have a look: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/Wireless
You not simply just uninstall wireless package to use wifi, you need to replace it with wifi-qcom-ac.
free-hdd-space: 1264.0KiB
With wifi-qcom-ac the free space will settle at ~800kb.