How to Reverse the role of the main tower and repeater

RouterOS General
1

I am moving an Internet gateway from one tower to another to reduce costs & increase speeds. I thought I should be able to add the new fixed ip at the location with the new circuit, change the default routes in each of the two routers, and finally change the src nat to ether1 attached to the new circuit.

Here’s the basic config pre change:
Tower 1 (Old role as main tower new role as repeater)
10.7.0.254/24 network 10.7.0.0 broadcast 10.7.0.255 interface wlan2
71.x.x.x /25 network 71.x.x.x broadcast 71.x.x.x interface ether1
10.3.1.254/24 network 10.3.1.0 broadcast 10.3.1.255 interface ether2
10.8.0.254/24 network 10.8.0.0 broadcast 10.8.0.255 interface wlan3

Routes
dest 0.0.0.0/0 gateway 71.x.x.x
(incomplete notes on existing routes on Tower 1.)

Tower2 (Old role as repeater new role as main tower)

10.7.0.1 network 10.7.0.0 broadcast 10.7.0.255 interface wlan1
10.7.0.2 network 10.7.0.0 broadcast 255.255.255.0 interface wlan2
10.9.0.254/24 network 10.9.0.0 broadcast 10.9.0.2544 interface wlan2

Changes:
Tower1
Change the default route from 71.x.x.x to 10.9.0.254
Removed the 71.x.x.x assigned to ether1

Tower2
Added a fixed ip 65.x.x.138/25 mask 255.255.255.128 gateway 65.x.x.129
Changed the default route from 10.7.0.254 to 65.x.x.129
Changed srcnat out interface from wlan1 to ether1.

Results - Tower2 clients now routing out fast ISP gateway. Great. Unable to ping 10.7.0.254 (Tower1). I need to connect to Tower1 then enable a second wlan interface to serve as the client link back to Tower2.

I tried a static route to 10.7.0.254 with a gateway of 10.7.0.1 (wlan1) but no luck.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Regards - Owen

2

Owen -
Can you from (old) tower 2 see the associated wlan2 card on (old) tower 1? (Wireless registration tab).

Next, quoting you above;

Tower2 (Old role as repeater new role as main tower)

10.7.0.1 network 10.7.0.0 broadcast 10.7.0.255 interface wlan1
10.7.0.2 network 10.7.0.0 broadcast 255.255.255.0 interface wlan2

What you show above can not possibly be… Can you get the correct info?


What it looks like to me - just based on what you have shared and reading between the lines -

The route from old tower 2 to old tower 1 would be any network on old tower 1 routed through tower 2;

For example on old tower 2 the statice routes should be;
10.3.1.0/24 GW=10.7.1.254 (wlan 2 on old tower 1)
10.8.0.0/24 GW=10.7.1.254 (wlan 2 on old tower 1)

Default GW on old tower 1 should be the wlan2 interface on old tower 2 wlan2;
0.0.0.0/0 GW=10.7.0.1 (wlan2 old tower 2)

And to finish this all off…make sure you have no NAT rules in old tower 1 still active. Also, you’ll probably have to reverse the roles of the wlan cards…I imagine that originally old tower 1 wlan2 was set an an AP, while wlan2 in the old tower 2 was set in station mode…you’ll have to reverse them - old tower 1 now become the station while old tower 2 becomes the AP.

R/

Thom