MikroTik

Hallo there.
I got two wAP ac here running bridged as simple access points without FW/NAT (routing does an IPfire based firewall). Connecting with an Intel WiFi chip to the 5GHz ac network only works if I set the the access points to 20MHz, everything above (20/40MHz or 20/40/80MHz) results in a connection Windows telling me it'd be up but I can't even ping the access point.
So I guess the wAP ac is fucking up something there as the Intel nic (tried both, 7260 and 8265) is afaik just able to handle 20MHz, at least this is the only option within the adapter settings for both, 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

So, shouldn't this be compatible downward with the 20/40/80MHz setting within the access points?

Regards

Tom

Which software release do you use on your wAP ac?
What does logging tell you?
Can you post an "/export compact" from the device?
Try to disable VHT rates completely and tell us whether you can now connect without problems. If so update you Intel Wifi driver (=> https://downloadcenter.intel.com/)

Thanks for your reply.

The wAP acs are running 6.39.1 and I'm running the latest driver for the Intel nic.
Well, disabling VHT would mean getting less bandwidth, doesn't it?
I was going for this access points and the nic to use it for in-house streaming, otherwise I could have used the 2.4GHz network as well.

I'll have a look into the log files tomorrow.
Again, thanks for the reply.

Which channels do you use ? Are they correct if you set the interface to 40/80MHz as combined Ce/Ceee or eC/eeeC frequency could fall outside regulations.
I have last week small problem that users's notebook with USA's settings could not see all Polish frequencies.

Well, disabling VHT would mean getting less bandwidth, doesn't it?

I cannot find the forum, but if you look for Intel wifi and 802.11ac problems you´ll find many threads. In one of them I found the hint to disable VHT. And yes this means less throughput.

I have a Windows 10 client with a Intel 7260 and the current Intel driver connecting to US version wAP ac's running 6.39.1.
Under HT mode VHT mode is selected.
No problems connecting to the wAPs on 2.4Ghz 20/40Mhz or 5Ghz 20/40/80Mhz.
Under the driver settings 802.11n Channel Width for 2.4/5Ghz is set to Auto, locking it to 20 Mhz causes issues.

First off all, thanks for the replies.

Well, for some strange reason it's connecting now when set to 20/40/80. Leaving the channel at "auto" took it about a minute to connect, I've set a channel now manually, now connecting time is still around 15 seconds, no clue why, but it works. Region was set to "Germany" all the time, although I'm not sure if it does a difference since there is no option to change that for the Intel nic. Also, VHT is active.
I'm still curious, Windows is reporting the connection speed for the first 2 seconds at 867Mbps but going down then to around 200Mbps, although the link quality seems to be high (even in WinBox). No clue if this is because of energy saving features or a different problem.

Anyway, it's connecting, the link is stable from what it seems, so I'm satisfied for the moment. Will send a big file through the network later to see if the link speed goes up or stays down.

Cheers everyone for the help, I'll report later about the link speed when sending a file through.

Edit:
btw, does the MikroTik routerboard R11e-5HacT Mini PciE card work on a usual motherboard with mini pcie slot as well? Was thinking about that option too when I was buying the Intel nic.

With regards to the rest of the thread, my experience is that the Intel wifi drivers do not allow >20Mhz channels on 2.4GHz, eg:

https://communities.intel.com/thread/51241

I poked and prodded the iwlwifi module and settings with iw all I could but it stubbornly stays on 20MHz. My cheap'n'nasty Dynamode USB stick with Realtek chip works fine at 40MHz, of course

btw, does the MikroTik routerboard R11e-5HacT Mini PciE card work on a usual motherboard with mini pcie slot as well? Was thinking about that option too when I was buying the Intel nic.

The usual motherboard with a miniPCIe slot is a laptop, so good luck fitting that heatsink in there. Once you've found a machine you can physically fit it in to, it will work with the ath10k driver.

I'm using this board:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/N3700-ITX/index.asp

And also many high end boards got a mini pcie slot for wifi cards now.

The problem was not the 2.4GHz network but the 5.2GHz one.
Anyway, it's working now so I won't touch it anymore.

Once you've found a machine you can physically fit it in to, it will work with the ath10k driver.

R11e-5xxx adapters work with ath10k driver, but based on my experience with kernels 4.9+, you'll probably need some patches for the driver to work properly, notable problems are:

- The EEPROM in the adapter tells that the driver should use default regulatory domain and the driver has hardcoded country US for this code path. "iw reg set" has no effect in this case.
- Probe requests (searching for an AP with hidden SSID) sent by the R11e-5xxx contain two tags "supported rates" and the first one is empty, probably intended to include 802.11b rates (the adapter is 5GHz-only, so it cannot offer these rates at all); such extra empty tag causes the probe request to be silently discarded by most APs (including those running RouterOS) and the hidden network is never found.

Note that when R11e-5xxx adapter is placed in RouterOS device (including x86 machine running RouterOS), these problems do not appear.

Ondrej

In some situations, Intel 7260 ac adapters suffer firmware crashes. Typical combination of conditions is 5GHz band, >20MHz channel width and >1 chain. Setting AP to use 20MHz wide channel or to use only one chain helps. Also disabling 11n at the client side prevents firmware crashes.

Tried latest firmware ( https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ke ... .git/tree/ ), but it still crashes under such conditions.

Ondrej