At our university, we have a MikroTik CCR1009 running a hotspot service for about 8 years. Over time, several adjustments have been made, and it has always performed very well.
Within this hotspot environment, we have approximately 4,000 registered student users, with up to 600 concurrent active sessions. Out of these, around 200 are staff users configured via IP Bindings.
The router was running version 6.49.19 and operated normally until about two months ago. Since then, the following issue has started to occur:
Users who authenticate through the captive portal (username and password) remain connected and function normally. However, users configured via IP Bindings suddenly lose connectivity. When this happens, their network status shows as “No Internet Access”, and they are unable to even ping the gateway. It appears as if their traffic is being completely blocked.
Troubleshooting steps already performed include:
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Temporarily disabling the firewall
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Changing the IP subnet used by IP Bindings users
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Downgrading the RouterOS version to 6.48.7
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Several other attempts
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I replaced the CCR with another identical one and restored the configuration backup.
Despite these efforts, the issue occurs approximately 5 times per day. The network operates normally, and then suddenly IP Bindings users lose connectivity. The only way to restore normal operation is to restart the CCR or disable and then re-enable the Hotspot Server — after that, everything will work normally again.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this issue?