Running Multiple Access points with single SSID

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hello all,

I am looking to get a little help with the following project. I have a 300+ room college housing Bldg with 7 floors total. I have one RB433AH with R2 radios each on 5 of those floors. Although the signal is very acceptable and performs well considering the whole bldg is of steel and metal structure., my side rooms (floor is shaped like a horseshoe) are not getting a good signal. Sooooo, I ordered 5 more RB433ah with the same setup. Heres the catch, normally I would use a WDS configuration, but each Ap is on its own Vlan with its own virtual DHCP server that is coming from the Fortigate Gateway / firewall. The college IT dept loves this setup but its unfriendly for what I am trying to accomplish. This means that each Ap is on a different subnet, so when WDS is enabled, I got major traffic collisions and ultimately it crashes all together. What I need to do is do a repeater or WDS situation in which the primary AP only associates with the radios on that floor only. WHen I enable Dynamic WDS, each floor starts talking and that is when I crash. I simply need to run two radios per floor both with different subnets but a single ssid as to not confuse the students that there are multiple ssids.

Any help from the pros would be great!!!

thanks! :smiley:

2

Why not disable dynamic WDS and setup static WDS links between only the AP’s on the same floor?
This way the 2 end AP’s would only connect back to the main one on on each floor

3

Ok, how would I go about setting up a static WDS link between two radios? I am new to MT but learning fast. I would assume my new radio will not be connected to the network via ethernet but rather act as a “repeater” this is what I am trying to accomplish.

any help to get me going would be fantastic.

thanks!

4
  1. setup both your primary ap and your secondary ap in ap-bridge mode
  2. on each device create a bridge interface and add the wireless interface as a port on the bridge interface
  3. move the ip address on the wireless inteface to the bridge interface (as well as the dhcp server and the hotspot if you’ve got one running on each level)
  4. go into each wireless inteface to the WDS tab and change WDS to ‘static’ and tell it to use bridge you’ve just created
  5. on the primary AP add a WDS interface setting the WDS-address as the mac address of the secondary AP’s wireless interface
  6. on the secondary AP add a WDS interface setting the WDS-address as the mac address of the primary AP’s wireless interface

Ensure that either default forwarding is turned on for both interfaces, or if it is turned off, ensure that each AP exists as an entry in the other AP’s wireless Access-List with forwarding turned on.

5

Thank you. I just have a couple of questions in regards to that post.

  1. What if both APs are running Eth1 as a DHCP client and Eth1 is bridged to Wlan1? Both radios are clients of two different DHCP servers on Two different subnets. Will this matter?

  2. Can AP 2 be setup the same way only not connected via Eth1? IE: acting simply as a repeater for AP1 yet routing my clients to my primary AP1 via the WDS? I would simply be using eth 1 just for POE> thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

6

1.if you’ve already got the bridge setup then it’s fine to include eth1

  1. thats fine for the secondary AP, you can leave it out of the bridge completely.