Pretty new to Mikrotik, I have a quite specific use-case I want to address, but I can’t find a way to solve my configuration issues. Let me explain the use-case :
I have a Mikrotik AP (hAP ax²) I want to use as a Wireless station to connect to a remote wireless WAN router. It would work fine if the wireless router stayed in range and never changed its frequency. However, it is sometimes out of range from the Mikrotik AP, and when it comes back in range, it often changed its frequency in the meantime (there is quite a lot of neighbors with SSID on overlapping channels).
And in this case, my Miktrotik AP seems to be unable to efficiently scan the frequencies, and reconnect to the remote router.
I tried tweaking in the “channels” section to find something acceptable, but it does not work as expected :
2412-2472:5 (ranging from frequencies 2412 to 2472 with a stepping of 5MHz each time)
I forced the band to use the 802.11n standard (the max supported by the remote router)
I pray each time the remote router comes back in range ?
Do you know a way of achieving this kind of use-case efficiently ?
If I use the scan feature, I can see all the available SSID in range. If I copy the frequency values in the “master” wifi interface (in my case, “wifi2”), it works almost instantly.
However, if I wait for my hAP ax² to do this job by itself, it fails almost every time.
In a terminal session, I noticed that the “station” interface has a field named “available-channels”, and it only displays one value.
In your second post you mentioned the master interface as being an AP.
Make the master interface the Station.
It should then automatically chase the remote AP it wants to connect too.
The downside of this option is that the now Slave AP on this router, will not be accessible until the Station part is reconnected to the remote AP.
An alternative might be do some sort of netwatch event and scripting to find the remote AP and change frequency to match it.
when it disconnects. (Perhaps there is something out there already that does this.)
It means however that I need to set my SSID on the master interface and not on a sub-interface. And I am therefore facing another issue as it seems that I cannot bind a DHCP Client configuration to my master interface (which has the tags Master, Slave and Bound) as it is a slave interface ? I’m not sure how I can address that.
Now, imagine I want to extend my use case to using multiple remote WAN routers like the one I’m currently testing on. They would not be used at the same time, but I would like my hAP ax² to be able to choose anyone of these remote WAN router (which have each a different SSID). Would this be something feasible ? Need scripting ?
When using wireless interface as router upstream interface, it should not be part of any bridge. Only when wireless interface is stand-alone, it can be used directly for L3 stuff (e.g. DHCP client).
To allow wireless interface to connect to different APs, you configure them in interface/wifiwave2/access-list/.
To reiterate warning by @rplant: when master interface is not connected to AP, the slave interface won’t be able to support working AP. It should be possible to work this around using some scripts, but I’d suggest to use dual-band device instead. You’d dedicate 2.4GHz radio to be used as station (to whichever AP) and the 5GHz woukd be dedicated to AP duties … which would work regardless connection state of 2.4GHz interface. In addition: using single radio in repeater mode (which essentislly is what you’re trying to achieve, you just use separate security parameters on virtual AP) means much higher airtime consumption (each frame occupies same frequency channel twice in stead of once), which degrades service to all stations connected to master AP as well.
But unfortunately, it does not work. Am I doing something wrong ?
For your warning, it noticed that quite quickly. Fortunately for me, I do not use the hAP ax² for it’s AP role : I have another AP dedicated for this. I got the hAP for its highly customizable configuration (most vendors do not allow this level of configuration).
I finally found a solution to my problem : with 3 different possible WAN routers, I know that one of them is 5GHz compliant (wifi6), while the other ones are only 802.11n on the 2GHz frequencies.
Fortunately for me, these last 2 are managed by the same person and they never are running at the same time : we managed to find a common ground, and both WAN routers are now configured with the same SSID and the same Passphrase.
The 2GHz wireless interface is therefore dedicated to these 2 routers, while the 5GHz one handles the Wifi6-compliant WAN router. Both wireless interface are now in “station” mode, and it works very well.
I would sill want to understand how the Access-List work, if anyone has the time (and knowledge) ?
