Hotspot and wireless bridging issue

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,

I have a number of “repeaters” with 2 radiocards in a hotspot site. One radio for “uplink” and one for user access. Using RB52 wireless radiocards I have no problem simply adding both interfaces to a bridge but in some sites there are CM9 radiocards.
When I try to bridge these CM9 i lose connection on IP level.

Radio’s are located on high poles and replacement of the cards are very difficult.

The entire setup connects to a gateway MT running Hotspot with a RADIUS backend and works like a charm.

I can set up the “repeaters” using simple routing, but this makes roaming and validation of the useraccess somewhat difficult as I think the only way is to have the user access card hold a seperate subnet and a DHCP server for this. Thereby the requirements for login is lost.

Does anyone have experience getting CM9 cards to work as WDS slave in a bridge?

Could I DHCP proxy my way out of the routing issue?

Any and all ideas are very welcome.

Cheers

/Niels

2

If you posted your current set up, it would be beneficial.

I assume your setup is something like the below

AP1
Radio 1 - Backhaul
Radio 2 - Access for clients

AP2
Radio 1 - connected to AP1 Radio 1 for backhaul
Radio 2 - Access for clients

Etc.

If so, over the backhaul radios, create a routed network.
Then from each AP, do a transparent bridge/tunnel using VRRP/MPLS.
Create a bridge on your primary device, add the tunnels to that bridge, create your hotspot and your DHCP server on that bridge interface
Create a bridge on each AP, put your client access radio or virtual access point on that bridge along with the tunnel that is on that device and you should be golden.

The below link should be the only one you need to accomplish what I have put forth above.
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Transparently_Bridge_two_Networks_using_MPLS