Can anyone tell me how to do this? It is mentioned in the bridging section of 2.9 manual but the link is broken. Even if it worked I suspect it would take me to the WDS section of the wireless manual page, but this doesn’t help me either.
I want to bridge an Atheros interface (which connects to an AP) to an Ethernet interface on an RB500 runing 2.9rc5.
Thanks.
I believe that WDS only works with MT equipment, so if your AP is not MT, if probably would not work, anyhow. Do you specifically need WDS, or will standard bridging work? RouterOS supports bridging an AP client interface to an Ethernet interface, so you could try that, if it would be a workable solution for you…
Hitek
All I want to do is use RouterOS 2.9, with one atheros interface and one ethernet interface, as a transparent layer 2 bridge.
When you say “…RouterOS supports bridging an AP client interface to an Ethernet interface…”, how do I make an “AP client” interface? As far as I can see the availble modes for an atheros interface are:
station
station wds
ap bridge
bridge
alignment only
nstreame dual slave
wds slave
Thanks for your help.
Sorry… “AP Client” is “Station” mode…
You would remove any IP addresses from the two physical interfaces, and then create a “Bridge” interface. Then in the Bridge menu, you would assign the two interfaces to the new bridge as “Ports”. You would then assign an IP address to the bridge interface for management…
Trying that now…
Hmm…OK, the setup is two routers (2.9rc5 on RB500), call them MT-AP and MT-CPE:
MT-AP
MT-CPE
With the PC address set to 10.10.10.2, I can access MT-CPE, no problem. I then set the PC to 10.0.53.2, GW 10.0.53.1. I can’t ping 10.0.53.1 from the PC. When I do the ping there is TX and RX activity on MT-AP wlan1 so the ping is getting through to there but apparently not back through MT-CPE.
Have you actually had this working yourself, hitek146?
The reason I thought it would not work is because of this:
I’m pretty sure that I have tried this myself, but I have tried so many different configurations(and yours is not one that I use, I tunnel and route everything) that I do not recall… 
I was already familiar with the note about bridging a wireless interface, but I’m almost certain that it still works with the correct settings. If memory serves, I think you need to set your CPE’s wlan1 interface to ARP - “reply-only”…
Hitek
You can’t create a usable transparent bridge unless both the AP and client are running in WDS mode. I still haven’t seen an explaination as to why this doesn’t work on MT, but it doesn’t (where you are bridging the wlan card set as a station and the ethernet port). If you set both ends to ap-bridge mode, add wds interfaces for each other, and bridge those with the ethernet ports, they work fine.
So, this can only be done if both the AP and the client are MT.
Does an MT with AP interface with a WDS interface accept connections from regular 802.11 clients?
The only place that I partially use your scenario in my system is for my backhauls, when only one link is involved. In this case, I tunnel over the wireless interface with an EoIP tunnel, and then I bridge the EoIP interface to the Ethernet interface. I know that this works… It seems like you might also be able to configure such a scenario using PPPoE instead, to be more easily able to accomodate multiple clients, rather than creating an EoIP tunnel for each client in your situation.
I still seem to recall someone getting the transparent bridge thing to work… Something about special ARP configuration and maybe the configuration of some sort of MAC NATting… I know I saw it somewhere…
Hitek
Does an MT with AP interface with a WDS interface accept connections from regular 802.11 clients?
Yes. If you want to prevent this, you can use the access list and set default authentication to no.
Hitek, I haven’t tried messing with arp and the transparent bridge…hmmm. Please let us know if you find that info/link/person who got this working
Read the posts by forum member “wisp-equipment.com” in this thread:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=3434&highlight=
Unfortunately, he says it has always worked just fine, but is broken in version 2.9… 
Hitek
It seems like the problem revolves around MAC addressing. Comparing the 2.8 and 2.9 manuals, 2.9 has a section on bridge NAT which was not in 2.8. There seems to be comprehensive NAT translation facilities in 2.9 so I wonder if it’s just that a different setup is required?
I don’t know how much more simple you could configure a transparent bridge than to simply create a bridge and add interfaces to it. If station bridging is still supported, but is now configured differently, then it would seem that the station bridging setup has only been made more difficult to configure than it was before. I don’t know why MT would make something more difficult to do than it once was…
Hitek
Thanks much for this bit of info Hitek. I never thought to try Proxy ARP…just figured it was a MT limitation and wrote it off long ago. I’m blown away that this isn’t in their documentation (!?). Hopefully they will fix this in 2.9 soon.
Hmm…the topic you linked to, hitek146, seems to have disappeared and the contributor wisp-equipment.com is showing in the member list as having 0 posts.
What could have happened here ???
That sucks…I was going to copy/paste that thread too, but hadn’t done it yet. 
It was there 4 or 5 days ago.
Based upon my experience as a moderator over at TV-Cards.com, I would suspect that the “wisp-equipment.com” account has been frozen or removed for some reason, and the topic quarantined to this board’s hidden moderator forum for private discussion or review by the moderators… If this is the case, the reasons can vary greatly, but usually have something to do with a questionable post added to the topic, or a subject matter discussed that could cause confusion or problems for the patrons of the forum. It is also possible that the thread suddenly went out on a tangent that was unsuitable for this site… Unfortunately, in these situations, the reasons are rarely let known to the general forum population, unless the topic is just edited by a moderator and un-quarantined for everyone to see again. Also unfortunate is the fact that Google did not have a chance to cache the topic before it was removed…
Hitek
Too much censorship on this site, IMHO.
Everyone here loves Mikrotik, so there should be no need …
(except removing spam posts)
Yes, censorship is now very common on this board. It’s happened on quite a few threads I’ve been in and normally just for the mention of someone else’s equipment. Draconian.
No doubt this post will be removed but there is a mikrotik mailing list over at part-15.org. If mikrotik don’t want to facilitate free disscussion someone else will.