Dear all, I am having some slow initial connection issues with Mikrotik and think I have narrowed it down to spanning tree. A quick rundown of my setup:
I have two a CAP2N which is running two wireless networks (corp and guest).
I have created two VLANs GUEST_VLAN60 and CORP_VLAN61 for the wireless plus a MGMT_VLAN70 for management.
I set all VLANs under the ether1 interface. MGMT_VLAN is not set on any bridge and is assigned the ether1 and has the management IP address set (which I can access no issues).
I then bridge the GUEST_VLAN60 to a bridge called GUEST_BRIDGE and also add the WLAN-GUEST to the this bridge.
Similarly, for the corp I add both CORP_VLAN61 and WLAN-CORP to a bridge called CORP-BRIDGE.
Each CAP2N connects via ether1 to a HP2530 ProCurve switch which sends tagged frames on that port for the 3 VLANS: VLAN60 (guest), VLAN61 (corp), VLAN70 (management).
All works OK, and I can get DHCP etc. What I am seeing is when I connect to the network via WiFi, it takes 30 to 45 seconds before getting an ip address… this is with STP enabled.
If I disable STP and set to none for all the wireless bridges, then i am connected instantly and get an IP address straight away in less than a second (as opposed to 45 seconds).
I am using a HP 2530 series switch (which is using MSTP, and has the lowest priority), I have to use spanning tree mode STP otherwise the Mikrotiks go offline so presume is some compatibility issue there.
My questions are please:
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Is it bad to disable spanning tree on the WiFi bridges?
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Any alternative to disabling spanning tree?
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Is this a problem with my design of trunking VLANs to the access point, and are there other recommendations people have for a multi SSID setup with an up-link trunk to switch with VLAN for each SSID?