I am looking at using MT as a wired to wireless client CPE device. At the moment I use a wireless bridge which is a transparent Layer 2 device.
I had assumed that I would simply add an ethernet interface and a wireless interface to a bridge but it seems from the manual that a 802.11 interface in client mode cannot be added to a bridge.
Is there another way to acheive a transparent layer 2 wireless bridge?
Thanks.
WDS or Ethernet over IP will do what you need.
check the manual theres some example configs.
I went through the same thing…there’s no way to do a transparent bridge 
You could NAT which in a way is better if they don’t already have a router as it’ll add some protection for your clients, but limits you as well. If you’ve got MT APs, WDS would be the way to go as there’s less overhead on the AP than with EOIP - Plus, regular CPE bridges could still connect to a MT running WDS ap-bridge mode.
Ummm …
Using WDS, one end is AP-station and the other statio-WDS, you get a transparent bridge.
You need to make sure the ethernet interface and WDS are in the bridged each end.
I hope that helps,
Thanks for your replies. Umm indeed!
The manual states that EoIP is a Mikrotik proprietory protocol so this is an option when using an MT AP and CPE, correct?
I don’t understand how WDS is applied to get over this problem. Can anyone explain more how this works?
NAT would appear to be the cleaner, low overhead option but I already NAT at a border MT to conserve public address space. I can foresee some problems with double NAT with things like STUN NAT traversal for VoIP and the like.
Well some of that depends on what b/w you need and what CPU power you have to hand.
Running Nstreme or EOIP creates some overhead, so on slow <266MHz CPUs you get very little - 5 or 10Mbps typically.
Without Nstreme things go slow on long links due to ACK timing, you really need Nstreme for those.
I did try EOIP early on tesing MT and it worked fine, but that was on a slow CPU so we dropped it.
I’m not sure how you intend using NAT, you don’t need that for a transparent bridged link - with WDS, it’s the same subnet each end and MT works out what traffic to send either way.
A routed connection runs faster than bridged, and comparing with other MT users, the difference is between 83Mbps and 86Mbps UDP on fast CPU, 5GHz Turbo with Nstreme.
I think there’s a WDS bridged example in the online manual, that’s what we used and it works great.
Good luck,
I think the problem (that I was implying anyway) is that you would need a pure Mikrotik network to use EOIP and/or WDS (or something compatible). The problem is, many folks already have a POP which may contain any number of branded gear. I wanted to start using Mikrotik transparent bridges, but don’t want to replace all of the APs at our POP. This isn’t a bash against MT, but I don’t understand why a simple transparent bridge (without WDS or EOIP) isn’t possible when there are many consumer level transparent bridges out on the market. As much as I love CB3+ bridges, sometimes I’d rather have something more robust like a MT bridge. Again, nothing against MT on this. Could someone explain what the limitation is with making this work?
You could use PPPoE. Not that I EVER see myself going down that road again.
Why not?
The PPPoE connection would have to restart to often. Never was stable. We found that routing was a much better way all around. Not nearly as messy to manage. No extra crap to go wrong.
It would be nice to start a poll.
CPE:
bridge
bridge with EoIP
PPPoE
routing
So, are we saying that when the wireless interface is set to station-WDS mode, it can be added to a bridge interface? If so, how do you stop other CPE devices in station-WDS mode from associating to it?