Strange TP-LINK Range Extender Connection Problems

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

Hi,

I have a curious problem I am hoping someone much smarter than me can shed some light on. I have a client with a hAP Lite installed and they purchased a TP-Link TL-WR840N to use as a range extender. They had problems connecting it up with the app and asked me to take a look. I figured this would be easy (connected a zillion range extenders, I work for a WISP), but it hasn’t been.

When the range extender is connected using WPA2-PSK (aes) I get this error: 7E:F1:7E:0F:B7:39@wlan1: disconnected, unicast key exchange timeout, signal strength -37

This should mean the password is wrong, however I know it isn’t. I have copy pasted it, and manually typed it out multiple times to be sure. I have changed it to various simple passwords (abcdefgh,12345678 etc.) on both devices. I have enabled tkip and tried setting it to WPA only, but no matter what it insists the password is always wrong.

As a test I ended up setting the TP-Link password to ‘none’ and then changing the security profile on the Mikrotik to ‘none’ and it connects instantly. However, the strange thing is now I see 2 Wireless MAC’s from the same device connected in the registration table, it’s refusing to lease an IP from the DHCP Client, and the MAC that is trying to lease the DHCP is the LAN MAC, and it isn’t connected via the LAN because the ethernet interface it’s connected to has been disabled.

Can anyone shed some light as to wtf is going on here?
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2
  • ad unicast timeout: have you double checked the passphrase? Make sure there are no whitespace or special characters (e.g. because of copy+paste) anywhere at start/end of input fields.
  • ad dhcp lease timeout: looks like tp-link device wants to bridge the network. This may not work out properly as this involves MAC-address translation (which the TP-Link device should do when bridging). But something’s wrong.
3

Thanks for the feedback and time. My first instinct was the it was user error on my part, but I quadrupled checked the passwords on each device every time I changed them. And I manually typed them out with the changes. abcdefgh and 12345678, it’s really hard to make a typo with those. Think this TP-Link is just f#@*. Saw some recent posts on r/Mikrotik on Reddit with a couple people experiencing the same thing. Tried updating to the latest firmware on the TP-Link too. No luck.

4

while working at a wisp, we’ve had a ton of complains that cheap extenders don’t connect or don’t work stable with mikrotik gear (we were giving out 951, ac lites and ac2). however it worked perfectly when using another mikrotik as extender.
those same cheap extenders (tplink, dlink…) worked normally while extending wifi networks from other wifi routers (non-mikrotik).
i used a lot of tplinks and still have some in repeater mode (dual band ones work perfectly - 5ghz as backbone, 2ghz as extended wifi).
so it’s up to some incompatibility between mikrotik wifi and other brands.
ps - if you config your tplink as router (i think that mode is called wisp repeater mode - it connects to wifi to the subnet of the main network, and extends the network with another subnet) it should work OK.