Hi, I need to bridge two physical locations with a WiFI link, and I need all of the devices in both locations to be on the same subnet so they can all talk to each other, and I need to be able to connect devices on either end via WiFI or ethernet. I would prefer to use the same SSID in both locations, but it’s not a strict requirement. Basically, I need to achieve this:
In location A, there is an old Buffalo WHR-G54s running Tomato serving as the default gateway and serving as an AP. I only have WiFI access to the WHR-G54s, so I can only make software changes to it.
I used to achieve connectivity in location B via WDS with an Asus RT-N16, also running Tomato, which just died. So now I have a Mikrotik RB951Ui-2HnD coming in the mail, and I’ve been reading about the different options here:
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Wireless_AP_Client
But it’s not clear to me which of those station modes allow for both wireless and ethernet connections on both ends, and I’m not sure which is the most appropriate given the heterogenous router hardware and software that I have.
The repeater function will not work with other vendors - you will only be able to have 1 client behind your Mikrotik this way. (It needs mikrotik in both ends..)
WDS MIGHT be possible, but that I have never tried.
This page is much clearer and better written than the Mikrotik documentation: https://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/clientmode
But I’m not sure which of that applies to RouterOS, and which would be best for my setup?
Thanks a lot for the Reddit link, that might do what I need. But I see that post is referring to a setup with 2 Mikrotik devices.
So, I guess I need more explanation on what a “pseudo station bridge” is, and how it works. Will it work with a non-RouterOS devices as the AP? And it will it allow clients to connect both wireless and via ethernet on both ends and still be able to talk to each other?
When I set it up following the reddit post I did not have 2 mikrotik units just 1 and could not get access to other hardware so needed to make it work.
“Pseudo bridge” = Layer-2 NAT. All devices behind the Mikrotik will bet L2-NATed to the same MAC (the Mikrotik’s MAC). It works only with IPv4 (the MT maintains a IPv4 addr → MAC addr lookup table).
Thanks for the explanation. And do all protocols work over this bridge, assuming they run on IPv4? I seem to have read somewhere that certain protocols might not work.
And what about “station-pseudobridge-clone”? I really don’t understand the difference in real-world behavior between this and “station-pseudobridge”.
I also ran across this option. Right now the AP is running Tomato, and it has a PPTP Client. (I assume I need a PPTP server, which Tomato doesn’t seem to have, and I’m not sure if the old DD-WRT builds for the WHR-54G have it either.) Could I make it work backwards with Tomato as the client and the PPTP server on the Mikrotik?
They only differ by the station’s MAC-address. In the station-pseudobridge mode wireless station uses it’s own MAC address, whereas in station-pseudobridge-clone it uses a MAC address of another device behind that station whose packet goes over the bridge first. The station-pseudobridge-clone mode may only be useful when bridging just a single device.
I’ve never used it so I’m not sure. It should work with most IPv4 protocols, since they shouldn’t care about their MAC address getting NATed, but there might be some weird ones that do. E.g. any sort of MAC-based access control would not work.
And what about “station-pseudobridge-clone”? I really don’t understand the difference in real-world behavior between this and “station-pseudobridge”.
Probably that is only useful if you have only one device behind the AP. MT will use that device’s MAC instead of its own. But with more than one device, all will still share one MAC.
I also ran across this option. Right now the AP is running Tomato, and it has a PPTP Client. (I assume I need a PPTP server, which Tomato doesn’t seem to have, and I’m not sure if the old DD-WRT builds for the WHR-54G have it either.) Could I make it work backwards with Tomato as the client and the PPTP server on the Mikrotik?
I don’t know anything about PPTP. From Wikipedia it looks like an L3 link, not an L2 link (like PPP)?
I think I see how DHCP could work (after all, DHCP packet carries client MAC, so it can differ from source MAC) but it does not surprise me that it does not work in practice This is a topic I have been meaning to explore for a while so I will set this up on my home network and take some packet captures.
You might be able to get away with a DHCP relay on the MT.
And just in case this whole setup doesn’t work right (I can’t test it because my Mikrotik hasn’t arrived yet), what is the Mikrotik term for a simple repeater? If the bridged and unified network doesn’t work, I could hobble along for a while with the Mikrotik acting as a wireless client to the Tomato AP and then setting up an internal VLAN and doing its own NAT and DHCP for clients that are connected to a different SSID that the Mikrotek broadcasts. DD-WRT describes it well here as a “WLAN Repeater”: https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Wlan_Repeater
This is a topic I have been meaning to explore for a while so I will set this up on my home network and take some packet captures.