3x hAP ac² (configured as Home AP Dual 2GHz and 5GHz); they are wired with CAT6 cable to the RB3011UiAS-RM
Questions:
a) Given that my hAP ac² are configured as access points, I’d love to use the Ethernet 1 port (typically used as WAN) as another LAN. What is the most efficient way to implement that (i.e. to have the Ethernet 1 WAN converted into another LAN)?
b) I’d like to setup the access points in a dynamic mesh configuration, but the only examples that I’ve seen on the forum pertain to access points that are wirelessly connected in a mesh topology amonst themselves. In my case, the RB3011UiAS-RM has no wireless interfaces. Instead, all hAP ac² access points have a dedicated CAT6 cable from their Ethernet 2 ports to a RB3011UiAS-RM port and I’d like all the backhaul communication/traffic between the access points to happen via the CAT6 cable thus freeing up the wireless bandwidth to use for client traffic.
I am new to Mikrotik (after 20+ years of Cisco, Linksys and DD-WRT) and I’d be immesely grateful for any assistance that you may be able to provide…
You would remove any IP configuration from ether1 (
/ip address
,
/ip dhcp-client
if configured) and then make ether1 a member port of the bridge named “LAN” (supposing you use the default configuration):
/interface bridge port add interface=ether1 bridge=LAN
b) I’d like to setup the access points in a dynamic mesh configuration, but the only examples that I’ve seen on the forum pertain to access points that are wirelessly connected in a mesh topology amonst themselves. In my case, the RB3011UiAS-RM has no wireless interfaces. Instead, all hAP ac² access points have a dedicated CAT6 cable from their Ethernet 2 ports to a RB3011UiAS-RM port and I’d like all the backhaul communication/traffic between the access points to happen via the CAT6 cable thus freeing up the wireless bandwidth to use for client traffic.
Not sure what you mean by a dynamic mesh when talking about cable interconnection. Do you plan to connect each hAP ac² to both other ones in addition to connecting them to the RB3011? If so, some dynamic routing protocol like OSPF should be used to control the redundancy, or STP at L2 (which is not so clean but may be easier to set up).
Have also a look at CAPsMAN, it could make your life a bit simpler and the roaming of clients between the APs smoother.
Hello Sindy, thanks for the reply. Greatly appreciated!
I am still struggling a bit with my setup…
On your question, my plan was to interconnect the hAP ac² to each other via the RB3011 instead of connecting the hAP ac² among themselves wirelessly. Does that make sense? My rationale with that approach was to avoid using any wireless bandwidth for management of client rooming and, instead, have all the wireless bandwidth allocated exclusively to client traffic. It just happens that I don’t know how to configure my devices accordingly. The examples of Mikrotik mesh that I’ve seen online speak only of wireless mesh setups without the APs having any physical (e.g. CAT6) connection to the main router.
On your suggestion, I tried to use CAPsMAN too, buy my understanding was that with it I’d have the benefit of a centralized management of multiple APs and not necessarily any benefit equivalent to having a dynamic mesh topology, including being able to roam clients between the APs in a smooth manner. After multiple attempts (and numerous You Tube videos!), I could not make CAPsMAN to work correctly and needed to reset all my devices and start from scratch again…
Thanks again for all your help… Again, greatly appreciated!
It does make a perfect sense to interconnect the wireless access points using a wired “backbone” in order to keep all the wireless bandwidth for clients, no doubt here.
What has confused me was why you were speaking about a mesh - a mesh network topology normally means that there are multiple paths between each pair of network nodes (and, to be more “pünktlich”, that the topology is neither a ring one nor a star one). But something in your original wording suggested that you’d be using a non-redundant topology so I wanted to double-check.
Outside the Mikrotik world, if you plan some redundancy of the links, you can control it at L2 or at L3. L2 is simpler to configure by just switching on some xSTP although it officially wasn’t intended for redundancy, L3 is more complex to set up as you need to configure dynamic routing protocols but you can never suffer a broadcast storm in the network causing bandwidth and resource exhaustion preventing the xSTP from resolving it.
In Mikrotik world, in addition to the above you can use their proprietary “mesh” protocol based on 801.11s draft even if you use wired connections alone, and it is proclaimed to be better than xSTP for the purpose.
On your suggestion, I tried to use CAPsMAN too, buy my understanding was that with it I’d have the benefit of a centralized management of multiple APs and not necessarily any benefit equivalent to having a dynamic mesh topology, including being able to roam clients between the APs in a smooth manner. After multiple attempts (and numerous You Tube videos!), I could not make CAPsMAN to work correctly and needed to reset all my devices and start from scratch again…
I’m not sure how control of redundancy in the “backbone” network could cause a better client roaming. The key to smooth client roaming is mostly the client itself which looks for the best signal with the same SSID, and an 802.11 extension which permits to simplify the authentication process when the client switches over to another AP; unfortunately, that extension is not supported by Mikrotik. Unless you authenticate clients using a RADIUS server, the gap caused by re-authentication on each switchover is not so terrible unless we talk about real-time applications (telephony over IP).
To have a smooth roaming, or rather no roaming at all, you would have to run all APs on exactly the same frequency and with exactly the same BSSID (not just SSID), so the client would not know with which AP it is currently “talking”. This means a shared bandwidth where only one of all the APs is transmitting at a time. Mikrotik does not support this. As soon as you have different BSSIDs, there is a roaming, the client disconnects from one AP and associates to the other one, even if they operate on the same frequency (which they have to in case of wireless mesh).
So yes, CAPsMAN is for centralized management, so you do most of the configuration once and only assign frequencies to otherwise identically configured APs. It also allows you to set up wireless access lists to optimize the client switchover process by kicking off clients before the signal quality gets too low - if they move between coverage zones of two APs, they will switch over to the new one before they decide themselves that the current signal is too weak. If they walk away from the coverage zone, they’ll be kicked off a bit sooner than usually but that normally doesn’t cause much harm. You can do about the same using wireless access lists on standard wireless interfaces (no CAPsMAN), again you have to configure everything at each AP.