Please could someone assist me with the following. Would like to use a hAP Mini to connect a device to an existing Access Point using the hAP as a LAN to WiFi Bridge.
My idea would be:
Set wlan1 to station
Connect wlan1 to WiFi
Add wlan1 and eth2 to bridge
Connect device to eth2
Device gets DHCP from network with hAP Mini acting as a LAN to Wifi Bridge
What settings would I need to configure on the hAP to make this work? I’ve played around a bit and can get the hAP mini to connect to WiFi, even got the device to receive a DHCP address but unable to ping anywhere on the network. Perhaps has to do with ARP?
Bridge the wlan interface with the ethernet one(s) at the hAP mini. If the AP is not a Mikrotik one, or it is a Mikrotik one controlled using CAPsMAN, set the wlan1 mode to station-pseudobridge. Attach a DHCP client to the bridge if you want the hAP mini to get its own IP adress to be manageable via IP (not just via MAC address); detach the DHCP server from the bridge.
The station-pseudobridge is important because standard wireless frames use a single header field for the MAC adress of the wireless receiver and the MAC address of the actual destination, as no one expected the stations (clients) to act as bridges when designing the protocol. So the wireless interface of the hAP mini has to do a lot of magic to sort out which received wireless frame to forward to which MAC address on its “wired” side. And the DHCP server must look at client-ID field of the DHCPDISCOVER/DHCPREQUEST rather than source MAC address of these requests to be able to assign individual IP addresses to the devices connected to the hAP mini’s bridge. This is how it should normally work, and the 2011 will work that way, but some DHCP server stacks don’t follow standards.
If the AP is a Mikrotik one and not controlled by CAPsMAN, you can use station-bridge mode at the hAP mini, and the wireless frames will use a non-standard format where four MAC addresses are used rather than three, so no magic will be necessary.
Unfortunately the AP is not a Mikrotik, it’s two different sites where we want to use this, one uses an HP Aruba InstantOn AP22 and the other a Ubiquity Unifi AC Mesh
Thanks, I played around a bit more using your suggestions and it started working. Not sure why it didn’t work before, the only difference now is I removed all other interfaces from the bridge that are there by default.
