Relay routes help?

RouterOS General
1

I feel like I’m missing something really basic.

I’m putting together a relay unit (see figure) to be able to serve a few customers (right) who are behind a hill from my my main AP (left), but who can all see one other particular subscriber (center). We plan to replace the center subscriber’s CPE with this unit so we can serve everybody.

In the past when I’ve had to solve this problem, I’ve just done a quick and dirty cobbling together of a discrete AP and a discrete CPE, run them through a dumb switch, and gave the customer a SOHO router indoors. This time I wanted to try something more intelligent with the StationBox enclosure product.

I have the configuration working, but with one annoyance. The CPEs (right) of the customers served by the relay unit can’t get out to the internet unless I specify 192.168.1.50 as their “gateway” instead of 192.168.1.1.

The reason I’m pretty sure I’m missing something basic is that this isn’t the case in any of the cobbled-together sets of dumb units that I’ve previously used to do the same job in other places – the downstream users could all specify the “real” router at 192.168.1.1 as their gateway (just like everybody else’s CPE did) and everything worked wonderfully.

Not only am I pretty sure I’m missing a routing rule, but it would have to be a rule so basic that three cobbled-together dumb units can automatically figure it out with no help. :frowning:

Here are the relevant rule sets:

[admin@Relay] > /int print
Flags: D - dynamic, X - disabled, R - running, S - slave 
 #     NAME         TYPE             MTU   L2MTU
 0  R  Feed         wlan             1500  2290 
 1  R  AP           wlan             1500  2290 
 2     ;;; User port
      POE          ether            1500  1526 
 3  R  RelayBridge      

[admin@Relay] > /int bridge port print
Flags: X - disabled, I - inactive, D - dynamic 
 #    INTERFACE       BRIDGE           PRIORITY PATH-COST  HORIZON   
 0    Feed            RelayBridge      0x80     10         none      
 1    AP              RelayBridge      0x80     10         none      

[admin@Relay] > /ip address print
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid, D - dynamic 
 #   ADDRESS            NETWORK         BROADCAST       INTERFACE
 1   ;;; Local user router
     192.168.10.1/24   192.168.10.0    192.168.10.255  POE
 2   ;; WAN Address
     192.168.1.80/24   192.168.1.0     192.168.1.255   RelayBridge

[admin@Relay] > ip route print
Flags: X - disabled, A - active, D - dynamic, C - connect,...
 #      DST-ADDRESS        PREF-SRC        GATEWAY            DISTANCE
 0 A S  0.0.0.0/0                          RelayBridge        1       
 1 ADC  192.168.1.0/24     192.168.1.80    RelayBridge        0       
 2 ADC  192.168.10.0/24    192.168.10.1    POE                0       

[admin@Relay] > ip firewall nat print
Flags: X - disabled, I - invalid, D - dynamic 
 0   chain=srcnat action=masquerade out-interface=RelayBridge

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2

Wow, I thought this one would get an answer within a couple of hours. Is it more difficult than I expected? Is it so trivial nobody wants to take the time? Or are people simply too weak with laughter to post a response?

3

I’m putting together a relay unit (see figure) to be able to serve a few customers (right) who are behind a hill from my my main AP (left), but who can all see one other particular subscriber (center). We plan to replace the center subscriber’s CPE with this unit so we can serve everybody.

I use RB750 to this purpose, no bridging, ip routing, ospf, using port 1 for input cpe ,2nd port to AP, 3rd port dhcp to customer, and two ports left over, works great.

4

Turns out that my problem has the name “L2 Bridging” and the larger issues are is documented here:

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_Station_Modes

At first I thought the “pseudobridge” mode would do what I want, and it seemed to work in testing, but the document implies that I could add at most one remote station with it.

I found a document at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Wireless_repeater on establishing a repeater, but it seems to be oriented around establishing remote APs, not remote stations, plus it assumes the remotes are all Mikrotiks.

Because I don’t fully understand WDS, I’m not sure if establishing a WDS-style link between my main AP and my repeater unit is what I need to make this work, or whether I would need to establish the WDS-style link between my repeater unit and my CPS stations (which would doom the solution, since they are not Mikrotiks).

This is too much of a headache.

Unless someone can graciously offer a simpler solution, I’m just going to eat the necessity of having to remember that these particular two remote stations are going to need to be configured to an unusual value of gateway in order to function.

Postscript: That doesn’t work, either. The stations can get out to the internet all right, but there is no pingable route between them and any other station on our backbone, including our NIC, so this is a non-starter. Plus the speed seems to be suffering.

Can it really be that I will have to strap two Senaos back to back once again to do what is apparently so difficult on a Mikrotik? :frowning:

5

Lovely, can you give me configuration details or other hints please? I’m at the end of my rope.

6

Are your Ip’s to CPE’s static or dynamic, I use PPPoE ip pool to assign ip address’e to cpe’s, what is the ip address of your gateway router to the internet.

7

All of the IPs in my network are static. My gateway router is at 192.168.1.1.

8

If you have the AP & gateway using the same ip address it must be bridged,

I have the configuration working, but with one annoyance. The CPEs (right) of the customers served by the relay unit can’t get out to the internet unless I specify 192.168.1.50 as their “gateway” instead of 192.168.1.1.

What dns servers are u using for cpe’s, have u tried dns= 192.168.1.1

I use OSPF for routing so no need to specify a gateway as ospf sorts out the routes, have u tried at 192.168.1.1
/routing ospf network> add area=backbone network=192.168.1.0/24 and repeat at cpe’s

I hope this will work for you as i use a routed network

9

Probably I don’t understand your question. In my router, the AP interface itself has no IP address. There is a bridge with the address 192.168.1.1 that combines a physical AP and a logical PPTP interface (which I don’t think is really relevant here). There is a public WAN route out, of course, but I didn’t think you were referring to that “gateway.” If this doesn’t answer your question, please try rephrasing it.

I have the configuration working, but with one annoyance. The CPEs (right) of the customers served by the relay unit can’t get out to the internet unless I specify 192.168.1.50 as their “gateway” instead of 192.168.1.1.

What dns servers are u using for cpe’s, have u tried dns= 192.168.1.1

I’m using public DNS servers hardcoded into the CPEs. This is not a DNS problem, the failure I am seeing goes down to the numeric IP level.

I use OSPF for routing so no need to specify a gateway as ospf sorts out the routes, have u tried at 192.168.1.1
/routing ospf network> add area=backbone network=192.168.1.0/24 and repeat at cpe’s

I’ve never played with OSPF. Although I’d be willing to look at it, if it needs to be turned on in the CPEs, it isn’t a solution because, as I have explained, I am not using Mikrotik CPEs.

10

I’m using public DNS servers hardcoded into the CPEs. This is not a DNS problem, the failure I am seeing goes down to the numeric IP level.

But don’t your cpe’s first has to figure out which private ip address on your network to route to first (gateway router)for the public dns servers, i use the private ip address of my gateway router in the dns for cpe’s+internal network to route to first then at this router is the public dns server address’s, which made switching dns servers very easy for test between dns servers.
http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
I tried this dns server comparison and got a big improvement with dns response and for me it was just one dns server to change on the gateway router?

Probably I don’t understand your question. In my router, the AP interface itself has no IP address. There is a bridge with the address 192.168.1.1 that combines a physical AP and a logical PPTP interface (which I don’t think is really relevant here). There is a public WAN route out, of course, but I didn’t think you were referring to that “gateway.” If this doesn’t answer your question, please try rephrasing it.

OK i didn’t read you were using some non-mikrotik equipment on your network, i was trying to figure out if your network was bridged as opposed to routing, so advice and any possible configuration suggestions that is relevant to your network.

11

The CPEs have a gateway IP coded into their configuration. They can’t reach it, independent of the DNS mechanism, unless it is provided as the IP of the relay station, in which case they still can’t reach the “real” router, but they can get out to the greater internet (I’m sure there’s an interesting story as to how that is happening, but I suspect pursuing it is not going to solve my overall problem). In other words, since the CPEs have hardcoded DNS server IPs from the greater internet they work fine, but if I had coded in the IP of my Mikrotik router for the DNS as you suggest, DNS would be failing too. In any event, this is NOT a DNS issue.

http://code.google.com/p/namebench/
I tried this dns server comparison and got a big improvement with dns response and for me it was just one dns server to change on the gateway router?

It’s been pointed out that attempting to optimize your DNS times can actually degrade your network performance.