Hi! I’m quite a novice to networking and mostly have relied on googling myself a solution, but this time I seem to be a bit too deep for my skill-level.
I have a system for competitions, where the results are entered via android tablets. I manually check the competition computers IP and specifiy that in the competition file, the tablets have an app, that scans a QR code with the competition computer’s IP and starts asking information.
Previously I had a network setup with 3x wAP ac (RBwAPG-5HacT2HnD): one of the wAPs made a network and the two others were setup to extend it. This mostly worked, but could give connection errors and timeouts (when 20-30+ devices all want to connect to the competition computer). This type of network isn’t recommended buy the creators of the competition system. They have also used 300+ tablets for entering the results - so it all comes down to the network and it’s setup. They strongly recommend a wired connection between the competition computer and wireless APs
So I purchased an additional router - hEX PoE (RB960PGS). The idea being that I can connect the competition computer (+ an additional PC - both are for managing/monitoring results) and 3x wAPs to the hEX with cables. Then run CAPsMAN on the hEX manage the wireless network. I don’t need an internet connection, but rather all the ethernet ports I can get (a third PC occasionally, maybe more wAPs if we need to host something bigger) - I’m usually deploying this on an empty field in the middle of nowhere.
I followed the Simple CAPsMAN setup guide in the wiki (https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Simple_CAPsMAN_setup); this didn’t quite work (because the wAPs are dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz)). After some googling I realized that I had to add separate channels for both bands - great, now I had a network at least.
The problem part is that the tablets can’t connect to the competition computer. (I run a command prompt → ipconfig; take the IP address assigned to the computer, enter that to the competitioon and the tablets use that to try to reach the computer.)
I have tried enabling client-to-client forwarding - still nothing. I wasn’t able to google out anything else unfortunately.
One weird thing that I saw was that when I open a terminal in winbox, then I can’t ping the IP I got via ipconfig - seems wrong to my novice brain.
So, in short I need a network where I have 3 wAPs (attached to the hEX) creating a wireless and devices on wireless need to talk to a PC that’s attached with a cable to the hEX as well.
Am I missing something simple? What should I be looking for? If you want to see an export of something, then let me know what and where (and how do I do it).
I’m quite a novice about networking, so sorry if I got any terminology/names wrong. Any and all help greatly appreciated!
Taavo