Okay folks, here’s the problem I’m looking at. We have a routerOS box connected to 3 AP’s. Each AP is connected to it’s own interface on the router. However we have started to run out of IP addresses on AP#1. We have plenty of available IP addresses on AP#2 and AP#3, but new customers on AP#1 can’t associate with either of the other two APs. So, what I’d like to do is somehow allow the same subnet to operate across all 3 ports on the router. Now I know that the quick and easy answer is to bridge all 3 interfaces, but that’s not going to work for us. We have lots of experience with wireless networks and we’ve seen in the past that when we bridge all the AP’s together our bandwidth gets killed with broadcast traffic. My boss seems to think that VLANs are the answer to this problem, but I’m really having trouble wrapping my head around this. Is it possible to set up a VLAN on the router that would allow me to use the same subnet across all 3 interfaces, but prevent broadcast traffic from flooding all of our APs?
There is no surprise you can not wrap your head around it, as VLAN is not a cure-of-all and will not help in the given situation (unless I forgot something … ). A better way to go is to make a bridge and filter all the broadcasts with bridge firewall (well, I suppose ARP briadcasts should stay, but they do not use much traffic anyway)
You can use bridge filters.
John