WiFi Wave2 and CAPsMan v3 and VLANs

RouterOS Wireless Networking
1

I’m struggling a bit and could use some help and guidance.

Right Now I have: RB4011 as a Router, 2 - cAP ac, and 2 - hAP AC3. No Wifi on the 4011. Currently, I use the old CAPsMan (V2) to provision all the devices as APs with 3 separate VLANs on each. On the 4011, each VLAN has their own separate IP space / DHCP server /DNS. Everything works great, system is secure and robust. These APs are all capable of using the Wifi-Qcom-AC driver package, and I’d like to take advantage of WPA3 and the roaming features.

Here’s what I found, often the hard way!

  1. I planned to provision one cAP ac with the new wifi drivers to test out the new features, and keep the other APs on the older drivers. I was planning on running the new and old CAPsMan side by side. I’d provision the ‘test’ cAP ac by MAC address. The cAP ac only has room for one wifi driver package. You must remove the old wifi driver and then install the new one. Makes it hard to ‘go back’ to the old drivers.

  2. hAP AC3 has room for both drivers, You can disable one and then install the other. Easier to deactivate one and reactivate the other.

  3. I struggled mightily with the V3 cAPsMan, but I did get the wifi-qcom-ac drivers to work on the cAP ac. I provisioned it successfully by MAC address, and the 5GHz connection was very fast! I tried adding the VLANs as slave configuration to the master config, and it crapped out with an error.

  4. Online searches gave me the impression that CAPsMan v3 and provisioning a VLAN don’t play well together.

Any help on any step in this process? I learned CAPsMan V3 procedure basically by trial and error using online examples, and making every possible mistake.

Thanks to all in advance!

2

One other odd thing. After I established the fast 5 GHz connection, the SSID was hidden. I had not set this, and I turned "Hide SSID’ on and off a few times, but the SSID was always hidden.

3

AFAIK the capsman v3 with wifi-qcom-ac does not play well when it comes to datapaths and VLANs … never figured it out my own with 2 hap ac²

4

Please have a good look at this part of the documentation:
https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/WiFi#WiFi-CAPusing"wifi-qcom-ac"package:

Can you share the /interface wifi export of both the CAPsMAN and the CAP?

/interface/wifi/export

Remove serial and any other private info.

I have both a mixed environment (cAP AX and wAP ac) and wifi-qcom-ac environment (cAP ac and wAP ac) working perfectly.

5

is vlan assignment for "slave configurations" working on wifi-qcom-ac in your setup?
e.g.
master config:

  • 1 5GHz SSID e.g. VLAN10
  • 1 2.4GHz SSID e.g. VLAN10

slave config:

  • 1x 5GHz VLAN30
  • 1x 2.4GHz VLAN31
  • 1x 2.4GHz VLAN31 but other SSID

never managed to get it working with 2 hAP AC2 with the wifi-qcom-ac drivers :confused:

6

I will share the export for both the CAPsMan and the CAP. I’ll have to reconfigure them first. I abandoned them to go back to the old working configuration.

Tx to all who replied.

7

Here are the config file for the CAPsMan controller and the CAP (Cap AC). I successfully provisioned the 5 GHz interface. The 5GHz slave interface did not provision. The 2.4 GHz interface did not provision either.

I’m missing something, but I don’t know what?

Help appreciated. I’m pretty deep in the weeds.
WIFICAP.rsc (673 Bytes)
WiFIController.rsc (1.27 KB)

8

This is all you have? Did you delete anything from the config?

9

This is just the WIFI config from each device. Provisioned the 5GHz AP properly, but was unable to add VLANs.

10

you (edit: meant to refer to OP here, but it's probably the same problem in both cases) are using "datapath.vlan-id" in your wifi configuration on CAPsMAN, but this is not supported with CAPs running wifi-qcom-ac. you have to manually add the wifi interface(s) to the bridge on every CAP with the appropriate pvid. after doing that it does work, or at least did when i tested it.

see the sample configuration for wifi-qcom-ac here and in particular the note: "Passing datapaths "MAIN/GUEST" from the start of the example to "wifi-qcom-ac" CAP would be misconfiguration, make sure to use datapath without "vlan-id" specified to such devices".

11

Post both, whole, configs.. It’s not just about wifi, especially with VLANs.

12

I haven't tried with multiple slave configs, but one slave is working perfecly.

As mentioned in the link I posted before, there are some additional manual configuration you have to add to the CAP to get it to work. Especially on this part: WiFi - RouterOS - MikroTik Documentation Basically it consists of adding virtual interfaces, vlan filtering on the bridge and removing VLAN from datapath in CAPsMAN. Your current wifi config is far from complete, can't say anything yet on the non-wifi part of the CAPs config.

13

Thanks to you all. I’m going to take another run at this. I will post the results and what I have learned.

Regards,
Dave

14

I looked at the references mentioned previously, and spent another few hours on this, but still no luck. I assume that Mikrotik had good reasons for doing things they way they did, but messing with VLAN IDs on the ports and bridge of the CAP?!? I’m taking a break until a few more months have passed and people smarter than I am have some experience with this. For now, back to the old CAPsMan / old WiFi drivers and rock solid, straight forward configuration. Tx to all for trying to help!

15

I wrote this script to work around it.
After changing CAP policy to static and CAPsMAN provisioning to create enabled, I manually created datapaths on each AP and scheduled this script to run every 5 minutes.
It's still terrible and I still hate that this bug exists but at least I don't have to log in to every single AP and modify almost every interface every time there's a change on CAPsMAN side.
https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/4883800

16

Thanks for taking the time to fix uTik's problems. Bottom line for me, the old CapsMan was a lot easier!