VLAN configuration on multiple cAP-AC with wifi-qcom-ac

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

As I already know the vlan configuration of cAP-AC’s is a bit nasty with the new wifi-qcom-ac package. So for now the driver does not have support for setting up a datapath/bridge over the CAPsMANv2 with configured vlans for virtual ap’s.

As in a former post I figured out that it seems to be best to create the interface in enabled mode so that they aren’t in dynamic state. Then it’s possible to assign a name to those interfaces on each cAP individually and add them to a bridge with enabled vlan filtering. Setting all this up for ~5+ vlans on ~10 cAP devices is really hard manual work that seems to be very error prone.
Another big issue is that changing the provisioning configurations on the CAPsMANv2 the interfaces and their names can break. Thus a lot of dangling old interfaces linger around on the cAP and the new ones aren’t assigned the correct vlans. With this I kind of broke my network and had difficult to debug problems with some wireless devices not responding when connected to such a cluttered cAP.

Is there anyone who solved this issue in a better way than manual configuring this? And does anybody have some information on whether MT’s developers would implement the vlan features as in the old wireless driver in wifi-qcom-ac as well? Because this issue makes it almost impossible to set things up correctly in larger deployments.

Here’s my old thread about the configuration of vlans with wifi-qcom-ac:
http://forum.mikrotik.com/t/capsmanv2-with-wifi-qcom-ac-and-vlans/171966/1

2

Have you found a solution to this problem? I’m struggling with the same it’s a huge pain.

I’ll look into scripting that somehow, which seems to be the best option for now. Wondering if you had it scripted yet or found some other solution.

3

No unfortunately not. When reading the changelogs of the current beta versions it also seems they don’t put any efford into the qcom-ac driver vlan problem. Asking on this topic didn’t receive any useful replies as well. It seems the developers are currently prioritizing other stuff. :frowning:

4

The solution would be getting AX devices. If that is not an option, just follow the documentation:
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/spaces/ROS/pages/224559120/WiFi#WiFi-CAPsMAN-CAPVLANconfigurationexample:

Scripting would make sense, just configure one accesspoint and reuse the /interface wifi part of this one.

If 5 VLANs also means 5 SSID’s, you could reconsider the environment.

5

I don’t think there’s a better solution for 5+ VLANs.

If you only have one single VLAN, you can work around the tagging limitation by creating a separate bridge with STP disabled and add a vlan interface from your main bridge to it. Set it as datapath before connecting to capsman and it will take care of tagging all wifi packages. For a secondary VLANs you can duplicate this bridge setup and set the new bridge in cap config as slaves-datapath.
And unfortunately this is where this work around ends. Anything more than this needs static interfaces and manually configured bridge vlans after provisioning.

6

This is of course a solution. But this is not a possiblility for me. I don't have any device or anything else that requires ax wifi.

And currently the qcom-ac driver makes a little incomplete impress, because it lacks the vlan datapath features. In my opinion it's even more strange that the vlan datapaths are configurabel, bot do not work. This really speaks for a bug or not yet implemented and proves the incompleteness.

Nevertheless one should say that I'm very glad that the qcom-ac driver even exists and enables my cAP-ac devices to have WPA3 and FT. But I'm still waiting for the day that the vlan assignments work again like with the old wireless driver and that I don't have to abandon all my cAP-ac devices in favor of cAP-ax's :confused: