IP connectivity basics

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Hi,

I’m feeling totally stupid and really would like to understand what I missed when I spent two hours yesterday not being able to connect an additional CAP to a CAPsMAN setup.

How it looked like:

RB2011 is the CAPsMAN controller (7.12.1)
hAP lites are the existing CAPs (7.12.1)
hAP ac2 is new in the setup and should act as CAP eventually replacing the hAP lite in front of it (7.13.5)
So this setup was always meant to be temporary just until the ac2 setup is finished.

RB2011 — hAP lite — hAP ac2
|-- hAP lite

Now in this setup I spent 2 hours trying to configure the ac2 as CAP mainly because it could not get a connection with CAPsMAN. I always was connected via winbox MAC addressing without any problems but the ac2 could not ping the other MT devices and vice versa.
From my connected wifi laptop I was able to ping all devices but winbox connection via IP was unstable.
All CAPs were setup to bridge every port and are configured as CAPs (so no firewall or anything).
I was searching for the issue for a long time until I gave up and connected the ac2 directly to the RB2011 and all problems went away.

Some ideas I had but apparently were not the issue:

  • duplicate static IP for the ac2: I changed it to others with the same issues
  • weird ARP caches somewhere: I deleted some ARP caches manually and also rebooted the routers

What (may be totally) simple thing I was missing? I’m really really curious what stupid mistake or obvious problem I missed. Any hints what it might have been?

2

Perhaps you installed the newer wifi package onto the hap ac2?
It is not compatible with that capsman.
You need the older wireless package instead.

(If it was also running 7.12.1, it would only have the old wireless package)

3

No, it runs the “wireless” package. I went into the whole wifi vs wireless thing in another setup.
But I also was thinking about it and about a downgrade to 7.12.1 but as it immediately worked after connecting to the capsman device and because even a simple ping from ac2 to the directly connected hap lite ran into timeouts I thought that the problem is far below the wireless driver.
But thanks for the feedback since I’m really looking for any good ideas.