Wirelessly extending network into another building

We have someone who wants to extend their network into another building but it is inconvenient to lay cable between.

I am attempting to set up the “Virtual Clients” option described by https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Interface/Wireless#Virtual_Clients and it looks like the simplest and doesn’t seem to require special settings on the main AP.

It says this is supported from 6.35 only in wireless-rep or wireless-cm2 package, but the changelog said one of these is obsolete
and the other renamed to “wireless” which is included in bundle “routeros” package. Fortunately, this is listed in my router’s System->Packages screen (both routers are new).

On the main (connected to internet) mikrotik has ssid “Test” and in both Wireless->Interfaces->wlan1->Wireless security profile is shown as “default” so I am using the command on the second/repeater router: /interface> wireless add mode=station master-interface=wlan1 ssid=Test security-profile=default. This makes a virtual lan “wlan2” appear in the list but still no internet connection.

The ssid of the second router is Test2 and I have the same wireless password on both.

I’m guessing there is something wrong with the bridge (or other) settings but I am not enough of an expert to be able to locate the problem(s).

How much speed do you need…

dsoodak,

You have to verify that the virtual AP named test is able to access the internet using any mobile WiFi devices that you have.

In the remote site, you need to scan the SSID that you are able to see and then connect it if it is found. The remote router has two options.

Option 1: Bridge mode
You have configured the remote router as a bridge

Option 2: Router Mode
The remote router’s WiFi wlan acts as WAN port, NAT with masquerade to it LAN bridge.

By the way, are you able to configure the above two options?

YH

When you say you want to extend the network and not lay a cable that sounds like a perfect use case for a Wireless Wire

They are already paired out of the box as a bridge. They beam-form so you just need to mount them on the side of the buildings.

Overkill in this case(don’t really need much more than 10meg), but nice product. Thanks for the info.

Do you mean using the remote router to scan for the SSID of the primary one? I’m having trouble searching for how to do this.

I just have the secondary one configured in router mode using Wisp-AP quick set, since this is the one I am most familiar with. The primary router has the normal configuration for connecting to our network via eth1 and I can access the internet through the other ports and with wifi (I chose this method of wireless bridging specifically because it only seemed to require a special setup for the remote router).

To make sure I understand what you are trying to do, is the following accurate?


  • You have two buildlings


  • Both buildings have MikroTik routers with wireless cards


  • You want to second building to be able to act as an access point as well as a client connecting to the other building using the virtual client feature?

Exactly

Based on the above information you used the wireless mode “station”. In station mode, you do not have layer 2 bridging so you need to setup a dhcp client on the virtual client for the router to get an IP address and access to the internet. Then you would need to setup a DHCP server for the clients in the secondary building to get internet as well.

If you are wanting to let the primary building handle DHCP, you can try mode “station-bridge” which will have the access point in the primary building keep a forwarding table containing MAC addresses that are reachable in the secondary building allowing you to use the DHCP server in the primary building. Then clients connecting to the wireless in the secondary building can get IP addresses from the primary building. I’ve never used virtual clients because it impacts performance so let me know if that works out for you.

nice illustration on exactly what you are asking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrW4OVa84O8