Traffic processing on CAP with WiFi CAPsMAN in 7.17? Possible bug?

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

I use WiFi CAPsMAN for CAP ACs with the wifi-qcom-ac packages without issues for a long time.
Today I upgraded just one CAP to 7.17.1 Then I see continous traffic between the CAP and the CAPsMAN on port 5246.
And the CAP’s wifi interfaces show ‘traffic processing on CAP’ - just like in good old days when we used the old wireless CAPsMAN with CAPsMAN forwarding mode.
This is very strange, because the wifi CAPsMAN never supported the capsman forwarding mode:
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/224559120/WiFi#WiFi-WiFiCAPsMAN
(The datapath is configured correctly per the master wifi interfaces. It works fine with 7.16.2)

I downgraded the CAP back to 7.16.2, and now everything is fine.
Maybe it’s a bug in 7.17.1?
7_17_unwanted__capsmanforwardingmode_wificapsman.jpg

V7.17.2 [stable] is released!
2

“traffic processing on CAP” means what it says: no traffic forwarding to CAPsMAN server.
The info-message was changed by 7.17.

Then I see continous traffic between the CAP and the CAPsMAN on port 5246.

Where or how did you measure/see this? What kind of traffic?

3

@kovacspro are you saying that with 7.16.2 you don’t see traffic between CAP s and CAPsMAN on port 5246?

In principle there will be some traffic between them due to station steering etc. Quite probably station registration is also controlled by CAPsMAN and possibly other things.

4

There quite a few things that need to be passed from cap to its capsman.

5

Why did they add this kind of status message, if local forwarding is the default and the only one mode in wifi-qcom-ac…? :smiley: It’s very misleading…
I measured the traffic on the bridge interface on CAP and CAPsMAN too, because on both side the bridge interfaces are facing toward each other.
It was a constant traffic (60-180kb/s) with no clients on CAP, too.

6

I disagreeabout being misleading. It’s saying that “traffic is bring processed on CAP”. I guess they added the message to always inform users that traffic counters sitting at 0 don’t mean anything (I can imagine a stream of complaints about counters displaying 0 when there’s traffic via interfaces).

Yes, message might be misleading user into search for “capsman forwarding” option … but if I have to choose between reminder about validity of traffic counters (which I’ll see often) and being misled about capsman-forwarding (which I didn’t use even when I used older APs due to its very prominent shortcomings), I’ll always choose (slightly annoying) reminders.

7

Hmmm … are you sure that it’s all CAP<->CAPsMAN traffic? I just checked in my network with 2 CAPs (one Audience, one wAP ax) and CAPsMAN (hAP ac2 without wifi-qcom-ac driver, so essentially wired router) … and traffic on management VLAN (used for CAPsMAN discovery, etc.) rarely exceeds average of 5kbps.