Hi all,
I’m a novice MikroTik user but very happy thus far.
I just expanded my setup with a new wAP ax wireless access point and would like to use this in the “ap bridge” mode. However, when connecting to the AP with WinBox and opening up Interfaces → wifi1 > General I’m not presented with any “ap bridge” options.
The only options available are:
- ap
- station
- station bridge
- station pseudostation
Having reviewed this article on Configuring standalone access point (https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/317128725/Configuring+standalone+access+point) I gather that none of the listed modes will achieve what I want.
I did make an genuine and good faith effort to search for clues but I’m afraid that I’ve come up short unfortunately.
If anyone has any experience in this it would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance and have a nice rest of your day!
KR
The “ap bridge” mode was used for enabling bridging over wifi (so-called 4-address mode) The good news is that this is still available, it was simply folded into the “ap” mode - in a sense it is always enabled and it is used whenever a station requests it. The station has to be set to the “station bridge” mode.
The bit of bad news is that generally the 4-address mode is vendor specific, so there is absolutely no guarantee that it will work with non-Mikrotik devices (read: won’t work), and even in Mikrotik-land it only works between the same “generation” of wifi drivers, that is: either between new ones that use the “wifi” package, or between older “wireless” ones, but not between the two.
Many thanks for replying!
I guess this could serve the community to find a good answer to the same question in the future.
I ended up using the default configuration from a reset, disabling the DHCP server, and putting the bridge with all the interfaces into the DHCP client – and it works!
Using the wireless connection to reach wired endpoints, thus far only over Apple devices but nevertheless.
Oh, I think I misunderstood your question.
The wifi as a standard expects further wired devices behind the AP, but it expects there to be no further (wired) devices behind the client (station in wifi lingo). For these setups, simply “ap” should be used instead of “ap bridge”. It has the same functionality, it’s only renamed.
What the glorious intellects behind the wifi standard did not foresee, was that in quite a few cases people would like to use an AP-station pair to extend the network to more devices behind the station (e.g. I have used this setup when I temporarily had to move my work desk with wired devices on it and wasn’t in the mood to pull a wire.) There are some workarounds, which only half work half of the time, but the solution is to use a non-standard extension to the wifi standard. In this case a pair of same generation Mikrotik devices can be used to form such a bridge. Nothing has to change on the AP side, but the station has to be configured as “station bridge”.
That’s likely all on me.
No it’s interesting to learn more about standards, and even more interesting that things actually work to the extent that they do.
I’ll revisit this thread again once I’m more acquainted with MikroTik.
Agan, many thanks for you taking the time to reply.
KR
Have you tried creating an interface Bridge and adding the wAP ax Ethernet port along with the wifi1 interface to it?
Hi Frank,
Yes that’s exactly what I did and it still works fine.
I ended up using the default configuration from a reset, disabling the DHCP server, and putting the bridge with all the interfaces into the DHCP client – and it works!
I must say I really like MikroTiks products thus far.