Issues with "station bridge" mode on hAP ax Lite

RouterOS General
1

Summary: hAP ax Lite (running ROS 7.17.2) “station bridge” mode does not work with RB951G running ROS 6.49.17. It connects but only passed data intermittently if I use “station pseudobride” mode.

Details: I want to use an hAP ax Lite in a location near a Schlage Encode Plus Wi-Fi lock. I note that when this lock is connected via Wi-Fi to a RB951G (or UI) or an hAP ac Lite, the Wi-FI never goes idle (Last Activity timer in wifi registration) for more than 300 msec. This causes the batteries of the lock to totally run down in 3 weeks. (They should last 6 months.) If the lock is connected to an hAP ax Lite, the Wi-Fi will go idle for 300 seconds before waking up. It was not easy to run an ethernet cable to near the lock, so I wanted to use “station bridge” mode to make the hAP ax Lite into a repeater.

I tested the configuration with the hAP ax Lite connecting to a Mikrotik Audience running ROS 7.17.1. (Observation: the hAP ax Lite needed to be configured to run the radio in N mode. If using AX in “Station Bridge” the radio would repeatedly restart with error code 8 in the log. Once in N mode, the hAP ax Lite worked properly as a repeater when in “station bridge” mode.)

I then attempted to connect the hAP ax Lite to a RB951G (because that is what the customer has at their location). No luck. The ax would connect successfully to the RB951, but it would not pass any traffic, nor pull an IP address via DHCP. After much troubleshooting I discovered that if I used “station pseudobridge” mode on the ax instead of “station bridge” mode, it works, but only very intermittently.

Is there a way to get this to work reliably?

Is this a known issue? Is it related to ROS versions or is it related to chipset or driver issues?

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If I read the manual correctly, it is a matter of wireless/wifi drivers incompatibility. The section Lost Features clearly states:

  • Compatibility with station-bridging as implemented in the ‘wireless’ package, station-bridge only works between the same type of drivers. Wifi to Wifi, and Wireless to Wireless.

ax devices can only use the wifi driver whereas all other devices except the ac ones on ARM architecture (not the case of RB951) can only use the wireless driver.

Regarding the possible way out: I assume you will use a dedicated SSID for the lock anyway, to be sure that it connects to the ax lite? So if the lock only needs to communicate with its cloud home, the easiest way is to let the master interface of the ax work as a pure station (that tracks the frequency channel of the AP) and create a virtual interface attached to it, with own IP subnet, dhcp server etc. to provide the lock with its own SSID and a NAT to the address of the ax in the subnet it is a member of via its station interface. If the lock has to be accessible from the internal network, you can use a non-ax device like mAP lite, or configure routing on the 951 towards the “lock subnet” on the ax lite, or even an L2 tunnel (but that has its own caveats).

3

@sindy: Good feedback and suggestions. I had not read the note you referred to in “Lost Features.” Thank you!