Hi Guys
Firstly, before i go any further, i don’t want this to come off as a Mikrotik bashing post, it definitely isn’t. I’ve used Mikrotik gear of a number of projects including wireless back-haul links, some advanced routing setups and as a VPN concentrator.
Quick bit of background. I work for an IT support consultancy, we provide Support contracts and maintenance and for small business and education clients in our neck of the woods.
We have recently taken over support for a school who are having issues with their wireless solution which they installed about a year ago. The company who sold them the solution marketed it as a site-wide wireless solution able to deliver high density, high-speed wireless access to classrooms full of laptops etc etc.
One of the reasons we were called in is to help them diagnose some issues with the wireless and upon attending the site and performing a bit of investigation we discovered that the solution was based on Mikrotik hardware, namely RB433’s with R52n wireless cards in. This surprised me a little, as (in my experience) you don’t normally find Mikrotik stuff used in this kind of setup.
Anyway, long story short the points are very badly configured, they are all set to use the same frequency/channel (they arnt too far apart so there is major overlap). The wifi cards are N capable but have only been configured as B/G, they have direction antennas instead of omni’s, the installer has set the regulatory domain to US (were in the UK).
What I’d also say is that as far as I am aware, RouterOS isnt designed for dynamic RF management or seamless client hand-off?
The other strange thing they did was to install a RB450g inline between the schools main Windows Domain Controller/FileServer and their switch, it had the hostname ‘traffic-shaper’ so I assume it was some sort of attempt to improve network stability. After some rigorous testing i discovered that in fact the opposite was true, it was a slowing file transfers down to ridiculously slow speeds. I’ve since taken this box out and performance has improved dramatically, I cannot for the life of me work out what on earth posessed them to do this?
What I’d like to know is if anybody here can tell me if the above configuration is would in any way meet a best practice Mikrotik setup? I want to have my facts straight before i confront the installer and ask what they were trying to achieve when they set this system up.
Like i said first off, I am in no way bashing the kit, its good kit, it just seems to me like they tried to fit a square peg in a round hole. We generally use either Ruckus or Uniquiti Unifi (depending on price consideration) as these are more geared towards this kind of setup.
Opinions?
/j
