Does anyone know if RouterOS 2.9.44 made any progress regarding the problem of Prism Clients Associating on Atheros based A.P. radios?
I see this with my SR2, R52, etc…
Adam
I doubt it if they haven’t acknolwdged the problem yet. Has anyone tried 3.0 beta to see if it’s sample problem ? Most likely going to get them to fix it in 3.0 before the 2.9 series.
Sam
I tried the 3.0 Beta versions without any success. I actually had some other strange issues, like random deauth conditions between the A.P. and the clients.
I’ll stick with the 2.9.XX series for now, and hope that with each successive upgrade we get closer to acknowledging the problem and fixing it.
Adam
Are you using WPA or WPA2??
What is WPA??
Adam
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WPA :
Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) is a class of systems to secure wireless (Wi-Fi) computer networks. It was created in response to several serious weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). WPA implements the majority of the IEEE 802.11i standard, and was intended as an intermediate measure to take the place of WEP while 802.11i was prepared. WPA is designed to work with all wireless network interface cards, but not necessarily with first generation wireless access points. WPA2 implements the full standard, but will not work with some older network cards. Both provide good security.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Protected_Access
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Oh, OK. I see.
No, we are not using WPA. MAC address filtering only out here in the sticks…
Adam
Something Funky is going on with Atheros cards and latest versions of ROS, Its not limited to Prism clients trying to associate, but all known chipset types.
We have noticed SR2 is severely affected, and there are now many forum posts supporting this. some the sysadmins have locked?
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/sr2-re-associate-problem/13306/1
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/atheros-client-re-association-problem-revisited/14561/1
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/sr2-or-r52h-mini-pci/14473/1
I understand completely. I see the association problem with the prism clients most notably.
I have seen the issue with the R52, as well as the SR2, and XR2. From our other discussions and other experiences; it seems to be happening everywhere.
I just got in a new batch of R52H on the shelf; I will start to roll those out ASAP to see what happen next week.
Yes, some of the forum moderators have been locking those discussions. Seems to happen all of the time, to many users at the moment. I have been told that we’ll have a solution when MikroTik acknowledges the problem.
Wait and see. In the mean time, deal and do not disturb the A.P.!!
Adam
any new information on this subject?
Here is my story:
We have a “x-brand” model AP thats been having really odd issues (somewhat similar to the association issues MT has), that we were hoping to replace with a new MT 500r5 board and a XR2 radio. We setup the AP correctly and tested it against a cisco 340 pci card (prisimII chipset), and a laptop based netgear wag511 (atheros chipset, version 5.0 card) and they all associated fine to the ap bridge and could surf 100% ok.
So we went up to the tower, which is NOT fun, on a small mountain, ~3000 ft up, and then climbed the tower (radio is mounted ~70 feet up on a 100 foot tower). Swapped out the “x-brand” radio, with he new MT AP and boom, no one associated. So we turned if off, and tried again, checking all connections to antenna, including internal pigtail. Turned it back on, and 1 person associated. We asked them to try the connection and they soon De-associated (is that a word?).
We then decided it wasnt going to work without some sort of testing, and put the old radio back in service.
Let me go into detail why we were trying to replace this radio in the first place. We had an older model (wrap board, with unknown radio card (I dont remember right now)) “x-brand” AP running very well, except that it would randomly drop all connections and not allow them to reassociate. We had to login to the AP and manually resubmit the MAC addy ACL list and everyone one could back up, or reboot the radio. The manufacture has NO idea why this is happening and say that we are the only reported incident of this problem. So we decided enough was enough after being paged at 3am when customers were dropped and RMA’d the radio. The new x-brand" we received was different hardware, but did have a engeinus branded radio card (based on the mac addy 00:02:6f, and the “x-brand” software has settings for “atheros” hardware). We setup the radios to match 100%, to try and see what would happen with this different hardware. Lo and behold, the same problem started to occur, only much more frequently. We contact “x-brand” which once again, was baffled. We switched out the POE adapter, had them modify settings in the radio to drop unwanted packets, and tweaked every other setting we could think of. Nothing worked. It now loses the ACL file and drops all customers at least 1 daily (before it could go almost a week).
Now a bit about the CPE end of things, we had/have 76 client MACs that are allowed to use this AP (59 engeinus 2811 bridges), granted I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than 40 ever associated at the same time. (customers have a habit of turning their radios off, with their computers, which is fine). Most of the CPEs are Engeinus branded 2811CB3+ Deluxe radios, which is running a prisim chipset, and smartbridge 2110s and such. We have 1 or 2 older customers still using Cisco 350 cards (if its not broke, dont fix it!).
From what ive read tonight, of the closed threads, I am truly happy. At least I know there IS A KNOWN problem. Now I also know that this isn’t actually being fixex, and it has been a problem for a while.
We have many APs, varying from engeinus, to smartbridges (old and new air nexus), to “x-brand”, and now MT. This tower is our most heavily used, and has a LARGE number of clients, on many APs, 2.4, and 5.7 (Motorola canopy). We have had no problems with association with any other AP, but as far as I know.
The only APs in our system currently that I know are Atheros based, are the “x-brand” and the new MT. Which are the only 2 radios having issues with our mixed CPE base.
Im going to try using the engeinus branded ahteros radio instead of the xr2, and i prolly will also try the R52H, we got at the same time. I know many have tried this already, and I really don’t think it will work. I will also try the enable/disable thing, to see if I cant get others to associate that way. I will also try to only have the 2811 CPEs on the access list, or only the smartbridges and see what happens. Ill try also, using the newest beta firmware, as a last resort.
Any ideas to add?
Thanks,
Kyle @ Washington Broadband
Does anyone having this problem have a spoofed broadcast MAC on thier SRx XRx etc? At one of our towers I have manually changed the MAC on the wireless interface slightly and it seems to have started behaving.
This particular setup is?:
WRAP2C ROS v2.9.44
SR2 (broadcast AP now with spoofed MAC) 25-35 clients
CM9 (Backhaul)
I have no idea why this has stopped our association problem, I no longer need to disable/enable the card 25 times. can anyone else see this same result?
When you say Spoofed Mac, what do you mean? Are you talking about Virtual AP? Or, are you changing the MAC address of the A.P. wlan card as it appears to the outside world?
What are your client radio consisting of? I see the problem with Prism client units. MikroTik units like Rb133 and Rb133C doen’t seem to have this problem with the MikroTik A.P.s
Adam
Now for some good news:
Let me say this:
Once you get the wlan device to register all clients, it is as solid as a Ford truck. The thing never hiccups, always is there, available, and on. I couldn’t be happier with the RB532 and R52 or SR2 units that we use for A.P.s
I am just scared to make an adjustment, software upgrade, etc. with it for fear of the lack of re-association of the prism clients.
Other than that, it is exemplary.
Adam
Changing the MAC of the AP, just the last hex. our clients are atheros/prism/ralink. Ive seen this association problem at our other towers regardless of prism client or not, and most prevalent with SR2 as AP.
I have read other threads mentioning XR2 and others being affected etc.
Something to watch for: some client radios match the ESSID (ssid) and the ESSID (Ap Mac Address) so even thought the SSID may be the same the AP MAC will change, the two don’t match suddenly at the clent and the client lets go, then tries to connect, then lets go, tries to connect… (a repetitive cycle). The end result is some clients may need to be manually reset to the AP, once I did this I can now power cycle the WRAP and all clients get back on. Weird huh.
Yeah, that is weird.
I will vouch that I have discovered that if you use a MikroTik radio at the A.P., then things seem to work the best. I have also seen this in client applications as well. Today I pulled an SR2 out of a Rb133c and installed a R52-350 to solve a poor CCQ problem. Worked like a charm.
Seems that the MikroTik folks know something about driving their devices that Ubnt hasn’t yet come up to speed on. I think this may be the price that we pay to be on the bleeding edge of some of this technology.
Adam
If that is the case, why was this problem not occuring with older versions of ROS?
What is ROS??
Adam
RouterOS
I think it has to do with the atheros drivers for the Router OS system.
Or, that is what I have gathered.
Adam
So I found a 2511 Engeinus mini-pci card, (prisim based) and put that into the same routerboard that I was having so much trouble with, to replace the XR-2 radio card, and wow, it works GREAT. So I truly think there are serious issues with the atheros radio cards being used in a mixed CPE network, and I don’t see myself buying any more in the future.