I have a wired client (a PLC), that I want to connect to a wireless network. I planned to use a small Mikrotik Routerboard to connect to the wifi, and the wired client connected to eth1 should get the ip from the wireless network, so it should be in the same network as the other wireless clients. I don’t want the wired client to be in a separate network with routing/masquerading, as the other wireless clients shoud be able to connect to the wired client.
So the task is like a regular access point, but the existing network with dhcp and internet access is Wifi, and the clients are wired, so kind of a “reverse” access point.
Sounded like an easy task, but I alredy tried a lot, but can’t get it to work, and I’ve searched the internet and also this forum, but couldn’t find a solution for this.
The documentation for station-bridge mentions, that this only works with mikrotik devices. The existing Wifi AP is not a Mikrotik device.
I tried it anyway, but if I configure wifi as station bridge, it won’t even connect to the wifi network. If I set it to station-pseudobridge, the mikrotik will connect ot wifi, but the client on eth1 doesn’t get an IP adress.
This is a limitation of the WiFi standards, bridge mode not supported except as a proprietary vendor-specific extension.
It’s a pity, it’s an useful feature that could really be made standard after so many years.
One way around it which I’ve seen in very old devices (about 20 years ago, back in the old days of 802.11b and some long forgotten “802.11b+” that doubled the data rate to 22 Mbps wow!) was that the “AP Client” physical device could connect to the AP pretending to be many different stations (each with the MAC address of the wired device behind it, in addition to its own MAC address for managing the “AP Client” device itself). So it was compatible with WiFi standards (no special bridge mode required), but newer devices didn’t support it anymore - they preferred the vendor lock-in which means AP and stations have to be from the same company (MT 802.11a/n and UBNT 5/M5 series can be made to work because they use the same Atheros chips, so they both implement the WDS mode in a similar way). Today it’s still a pity that even MT didn’t make over-the-air-compatible WDS between their own A/N/AC and new AX devices.