How to make a CAPsMAN redundant?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi all; I have a CAPsMAN server on RB3011 and all works great. As I have another RB3011 as interconnection router, I was wandering if I could employ it to be a backup CAPsMAN router?

The issue I see is that CAPsMAN is configured on the main router where the bridges are defined over which wlan traffic passes, so I am not sure if that would be possible to replicate.

Thanks!

2

If the bridges are replicable on the other router is solely your realm. If so, it’s absolutely possible to add a redundant CAPsMAN.
Make the two a vrrp cluster and clone the CAPsMAN config over to the other. Make your APs connect to the vrid. Make sure you disable all L2 connectivity for APs and manager.
I did this a couple of times and it really works well.
-Chris

3

But Chris, once you do changed in one CAPsMAN (edit access list, change/add SSID etc) you have to manually change it also on backup CAPsMAN. Or do you have any “auto sync” of changes on main CAPsMAN into backup CAPsMAN?

4

That’s unfortunately true.
I have a set of scripts ready that push new new config to the backup capsman.
First script exports the current /caps-man config into a file.
Then I have another file ready that completely wipes the current /caps-man config.

The wipe script is uploaded via ftp as wipecaps.auto.rsc to the backup manager.
After 5s delay, the export is uploaded as caps.auto.rsc to the backup manager.
Done.

I wish routerOS had some redundancy features making this unnecessary :frowning:

-Chris

5

Chris,

How has your script been working in production environments with larger CAP deployments? This would be useful for us when doing rolling maintenance.

RouterOS lets you specify backup CAPsMAN servers, but ofcourse no way to sync… which is stupid. We need to pester MikroTik monthly for feature addition. CAPS do not communicate when the CAPsMAN controller is down… Other vendors AP’s work and will continue passing traffic when controller is missing.

Could you perhaps message me your script info?

6

RouterOS lets you specify backup CAPsMAN servers, but ofcourse no way to sync… which is stupid. We need to pester MikroTik monthly for feature addition

This is so obviously correct and self-evident that I am surprised every single CAPsMAN user is not pestering Mikrotik on this, and I wonder how many hyper-fragile deployments are out there as we speak…
Providing functionality to do automatic failover to another CAPsMAN server but providing bugger all support to replicate the CAPsMAN configuration between different controllers makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.