I have a 3 (dual~)radio/AP network where we have hotspot running on the AP of the unit that’s connected to the gateway for internet access (Local: Radio1-AP)
All 3 Accespoint have dual radio’s and we use the 2nd radio to maintain a backhaul link to connect remote AP’s to Local Radio2
On this moment only clients using the AP which has the Hotspot will hit that Hotspot. Users logging in on the two other AP’s (radio’s 1) are routed straight to the gateway. They are on the same subnet as the gateway. The Hotspot is bypassed which seems logical to me.
But someone told me a Hotspot doesn’t run on a bridge so we’ve routed the hotspot traffic (hotspot has its own subnet) to go to the eth. gate.
But how do I make the hotspot run such that it intercepts all traffic from both the local AP and the remote one’s (through the backhaul’s)?
Or, when I set up WDS on the three (2x remote, 1x local) AP-radio 1’s, does traffic coming from all AP’s hit the Hotspot on the local AP-radio 1?
In this case, what happens to traffic from clienst associated to remote AP’s that comes in on the Backhaul link on the local unit (radio 2)?
Can I bring all, local eth, local AP and local Backhaul radio in one bridge and have this bridge interface running the Hotspot?
The reason for running a Backhaul network parrallel to a WDS mesh is because 'we’ve the wrong antenna’s for the Backhaul and therefore fot the time beeing a bad backhaul or none, at times. We need to change them to 5.xGhz but that will take some time and money. In the mean time we want the network to run a good as possible.
try setting up hotspots on each of the AP’s. Also, i do about the same thing with 1 backhaul radio and 1 ap radio. I have the backhaul in wds and the ap in normal ap mode. The hotspot on each ap card prevents users from accessing anything without logging in. You don’t need to put anything in a bridge except for the master, which needs the backhaul interface and the eth0 interface.
But someone told me a Hotspot doesn’t run on a bridge so we’ve routed the hotspot traffic (hotspot has its own subnet) to go to the eth. gate.
But how do I make the hotspot run such that it intercepts all traffic from both the local AP and the remote one’s (through the backhaul’s)?
Or, when I set up WDS on the three (2x remote, 1x local) AP-radio 1’s, does traffic coming from all AP’s hit the Hotspot on the local AP-radio 1?
Someone told you wrong - Hotspot certainly does run on the bridge - and a way to do what you’re looking to do is to bridge all the interfaces that need hotspot access and set the hotspot up on the bridge…
You can even have a single hotpot authentication router with a number of bridged routers each with a number of bridged interfaces…
Defek7: Each AP with an Hotspot seems a nice thought, but will give a lot of hazzle I think. You need to administre three Hotspots, triple chance of problems. Secondly, we want ALL user, so even the one that are not allowed to the internet, to browse on our business website. This site will host a weather station and lots of info. This site will run on a webserver on the eth. side of the Main AP (which also has the gateway).
But OK, it might work. That can be managed by routing etc. but I think I like more the next;
GWISA: OK, now we’re getting somewhere. So if the Backhaul radio interface is also in the bridge (with the main AP and the eth to the wiredlan+gateway+webserver) ALL traffic coming from the wireless part will hit the hotspot, Am I right?
Correct - I intend doing exactly the same on a setup I currently have running in the Mesh configuration which does not work properly.
The only workaround I can see is to do what you want to do & use 5GHz backhaul with WDS and 2.4 AP’s - all bridged, with a single router handling the Hotspot.
At this stage, I have 9 node routers pointing to 1 Hotspot authentication router using WDS & rstp.
