I’d like to use CAPsMAN on an RB4011 (RouterOS 7.23.2) to provision an RBGrooveA‑52HPn.
On the RB4011 both the new wifi stack and the legacy wireless stack are present. However, the Groove can only be configured via the old wireless stack — all configuration attempts using the new wifi stack fail on the Groove itself.
When I enable CAP using the new wifi stack on the Groove, it successfully connects to the CAPsMAN on the RB4011, but no provisioning happens: the CAP is shown as connected, yet no configuration is pushed and no working WLAN interfaces are created.
When I enable CAP using the old wireless stack on the Groove, it does not establish any connection to the CAPsMAN on the RB4011.
After some effort I managed to get an L41G‑2axD provisioned by the RB4011. In that case the issue was that the configuration manager in the wifi stack was not set to capsman.
Unfortunately I have not found anything comparable in the old wireless stack. In addition, in that stack the device does not establish a connection to CAPsMAN at all.
My question is: in this setup, is it actually possible to provision the Groove from the RB4011 via CAPsMAN at all, or is this combination fundamentally unsupported?
That device can only be configured using legacy wifi drivers.
Which means you have to set back that RB4011 to old wireless exclusively and configure everything using old capsman.
If you would use a controller without wifi radios, you would be able to use both capsman environments but what would be the point each controlling only 1 radio ?
I find it very convenient to be able to centrally manage all configurations for the individual APs from a single device.
So, I would have to downgrade to the RB4011 in order to provision the L41G-2axD, the two RBGrooveA-52HPn units, and the wAPG-5HaxD2HaxD from it using the old CAPsMan, right?
Perhaps I’d be better off skipping CAPsMan altogether and configuring the APs separately.
As @holvoetn already mentioned, legacy CAPsMAN and new CAPsMAN can coexist on same device ... new CAPsMAN is included in basic routeros package and legacy CAPsMAN needs optional wireless package installed. But there are a few gotchas:
configuration of both CAPsMANs is distinct (made in separate configuration tree branches) and somehow syntactically different, so you can't simply copy-paste same configuration in both places.
Running both CAPsMANs on same device also doesn't improve WiFi station mobility between legacy and modern APs ... because legacy CAPsMAN doesn't support any of modern mobility features anyway.
package wireless conflicts with any of optional wifi-[*] packages (e.g. wifi-qcom-ac), only one of them can be active (even though it's technically possible to install both). And wireless is required to be installed and active to offer functionality of legacy CAPsMAN.
The gotcha part of this bullet is that when running CAPsMAN on device with wireless interfaces, having wireless active might mean that local WiFi radios can become non-operational (when radios require running new wifi dirvers, e.g. on AX devices). Or they might operate at reduced throughput if radios are compatible with both drivers (most AC devices) where wifi drivers offer better performance.
In case of RB4011 it's a weird combination of both cases mentioned in bullet #2 ... albeit in a different direction: its 2.4GHz radio is not compatible with new wifi drivers, so installing wifi-qcom-ac on RB4011 actually drops 2.4GHz radio ... while the 5GHz radio starts to shine. But since you want to run legacy CAPsMAN on your RB4011, you have to run wireless package and both of your radios are operational ... but even if you don't care about 2.4GHz radio on RB4011 and would like to run wifi-qcom-ac to maximize performance of its 5GHz radio, you can't.
So in short: as @holvoetn already wrote, if one wants to run both legacy and new CAPsMAN on same device, it's best to do it on device without wireless hardware. This way none of above considerations about wireless drivers apply.
As to the mix of devices mentioned: both wAP ax (wAPG-5HaxD2HaxD) and hAP ax lite (L41G-2axD) require the new CAPsMAN, while GrooveA 52 (RBGrooveA-52HPn) requires legacy CAPsMAN. So no way of provisioning all of them using one CAPsMAN instance.
Legacy wireless allows for local (to CAPsMAN) radios to be provisioned by CAPsMAN, so you can use (the legacy) CAPsMAN to provision also radios on RB4011. The new CAPsMAN can not be directly used to provision local radios ... but with the new CAPsMAN, configuration for both local radios and remote radios is set in same place and it's possible to use same configuration profiles for both CAPsMAN-provisioned remote APs and local radios.
First of all, thank you very much for your detailed reply and description of the setup. I installed the wireless package on the RB4011, and the connection to the Groove devices is working.
You mentioned that running both CAPsMAN instances on a device that also has its own wireless module can lead to problems.
But the RB4011 router doesn't actually have a wireless interface, does it? Or am I misunderstanding something?
In that case, since you have wireless loaded on that RB4011 (without radios !), you can use both capsman environments.
Legacy capsman because you loaded wireless package.
Actual capsman (wave2) because since ROS 7.12 (I think, could be 7.13) hooks for capsman-control for wave2 devices is embedded in base ROS package.
It's since 7.13 indeed. 7.12.x was the last version where new capsman was part of optional wifi-qcom* packages ... this version also offers hooks to do (more or less) seamless upgrade from pre-7.12 to post 7.12.