I just upgraded 10 MikroTik cAP ac to the newest firmware (especially wifi wave2) and i’m interested in using the roaming features (fast handover/connection; i.e. 802.11r).
Is there a way to achieve this without using the central management / CAPsMAN?
If not, I’m a beginner with CAPsMAN; and use VLAN segmentation: Most APs have a tagged VLAN uplink in ether1, some cAP ac’s forward only one untagged VLAN over the ether2, while others are daisy chained and forward the tagged VLAN uplink via ether2 (as input for the next cAP ac).
Lastly, there is one VLAN wifi uplink / wireless bridge where no LAN cable was available: Here, the VLAN uplink is forwarded via a special SSID wifi and another mikrotik converts the wifi signal and provides the VLAN uplink tagged as ether2 to the next AP.
I’m not sure whether such a complex scenario can be realized with CAPsMAN (i guess i’m able to configure ether individually; but can i manage a AP bridge/station over CAPsMAN - and even achieve a handover in this scenario?
Right now, everything works but without using the roaming standards.
I haven’t tested this yet, but with the “wifi” driver, there is no difference between the “standalone” and “capsman” configuration, so a station-bridge device should be able to connect to the AP configured using CAPsMAN; however, that station-bridge device must run wifi-qcom or wifi-qcom-ac as well. If it cannot, you’ll have to use it in mere station mode and use an L2 over IP tunnel to link the VLAN(s) on the isolated cAP ac with the rest of the network. If there is enough reserve in the L2MTU at both devices, you can use any L2 over IP tunneling protocol if you adjust the L3 MTU for that “special SSID” interface to 1550 (that’s for VXLAN transporting tagless frames) or more so that the tunnel interface could still have an MTU of 1500. With VXLANs, it would be formally correct to use a dedicated VXLAN for each VLAN; the Mikrotik implementation of VXLANs did transport 802.1Q tagged frames but I haven’t tested whether it is still the case with the current releases.
I would definitely not manage the station or station-bridge device using CAPsMAN as it might lock itself out.
Off topic, since even isolated devices need powering, have you considered using PLC to connect the isolated AP to the rest of the network? Depending on the AC wiring, the best ones available may provide several hundreds of Mbps throughput, so the overall throughput may be better than with wireless store-and-forward.
you will lose the interface that is the Station. (Capsman takes over control of an interface so it’s impossible to have capsman configure the station interface as the connection will drop)
You can connect the other interfaces (exp.: wifi2) to the capsman.