I made the decision to migrate from a Motorola wireless network to a Mikrotik based WDS/mesh network on my ISP. To say the experience has been painful doesn't even begin to cover it. I come from a Cisco CCIE background so maybe im spoiled by good documentation and stability.

Currently I cannot for the life of me get 5SXT radios to form a proper mesh. Currently im using wds/RSTP in a bridge, and while my clients can connect I cannot manage any radio beyond the gateway radio. winbox wont connect via IP or MAC yet they pass data. Ive been bashing my head against barely usable documentation and unpredictable results now for over a month.This is affecting 2500+ customers.

I'm asking anyone at Mikrotik to PLEASE put out a proper mesh howto as the ones currently on the wiki are badly flawed and just plain dont work. My other choice is to remove the MT gear, smash it with a hammer and go with another vendor. our "Mikrotik consultant" which we have paid a large sum of money to to help with this transition knows less about networking than i do, so that hasnt been much help either.

I made the decision to migrate from a Motorola wireless network to a Mikrotik based WDS/mesh network on my ISP. To say the experience has been painful doesn't even begin to cover it. I come from a Cisco CCIE background so maybe im spoiled by good documentation and stability.

Currently I cannot for the life of me get 5SXT radios to form a proper mesh. Currently im using wds/RSTP in a bridge, and while my clients can connect I cannot manage any radio beyond the gateway radio. winbox wont connect via IP or MAC yet they pass data. Ive been bashing my head against barely usable documentation and unpredictable results now for over a month.This is affecting 2500+ customers.

I'm asking anyone at Mikrotik to PLEASE put out a proper mesh howto as the ones currently on the wiki are badly flawed and just plain dont work. My other choice is to remove the MT gear, smash it with a hammer and go with another vendor. our "Mikrotik consultant" which we have paid a large sum of money to to help with this transition knows less about networking than i do, so that hasnt been much help either.

For sure, Mikrotik's manuals are not the best.
Last days I also spend many hours trying to create a MESH network + Hotspot.
If you need just mesh then it is much easier.

First take alook at this : http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Wireless_WDS_Mesh

Describes two ways, I chose dynamic mesh. Give IP's to the mesh (or bridge) interface and add the ethernet to that interface on the router that acts as "gateway".DHCP server also on this interface.
You can choose static mesh if you want to have control on which AP is connecting to another. check this http://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php ... sh#p394247
Dont forget the wireless>>access list, very useful.

The bridge (RSTP) method was problematic for me.

And a last tip. If things are not ok, try rebooting the routers, it helps

Good luck
Andreas

I would suggest to use static-mesh mode for WDS links - configure all your WDS links and add them statically to the bridge ports (do not use the automatic wds-default-bridge mode). When adding them into the bridge ports setup the path costs according your configuration. Don't forget to enable RSTP mode for the bridge and also I suggest to set a lower priority for the main routers bridge interface so it would be as a root bridge port.

I made the decision to migrate from a Motorola wireless network to a Mikrotik based WDS/mesh network on my ISP. To say the experience has been painful doesn't even begin to cover it. I come from a Cisco CCIE background so maybe im spoiled by good documentation and stability.

Currently I cannot for the life of me get 5SXT radios to form a proper mesh. Currently im using wds/RSTP in a bridge, and while my clients can connect I cannot manage any radio beyond the gateway radio. winbox wont connect via IP or MAC yet they pass data. Ive been bashing my head against barely usable documentation and unpredictable results now for over a month.This is affecting 2500+ customers.

I'm asking anyone at Mikrotik to PLEASE put out a proper mesh howto as the ones currently on the wiki are badly flawed and just plain dont work. My other choice is to remove the MT gear, smash it with a hammer and go with another vendor. our "Mikrotik consultant" which we have paid a large sum of money to to help with this transition knows less about networking than i do, so that hasnt been much help either.

Contact me at training[at]atris[dot]sk. I will help you for free, and if we get it working, THEN you can decide to pay me as a consultant.

We have a rather large wireless coverage using all MikroTik gear, working no problem using NV2 and WDS.

... Winbox won't connect via IP or MAC yet they pass data ...

Do contact tomaskir and take advantage of his very generous offer. Regarding your statement, you most likely have your bridge interface setup incorrectly.

Building anything complex on top of the MT gear and stack is a gamble, always. The software is too darn unpredictable.

Building anything complex on top of the MT gear and stack is a gamble, always. The software is too darn unpredictable.

A few outages recently by high priced gear and yet our MT gear works with very few issues has me thinking is high priced equipment always a good choice?

Have you contacted any MK professionals?
MikroTik equipment is dirt cheap compared to Cisco. You can not honestly expect support to be in the same class.

Have you contacted any MK professionals?
MikroTik equipment is dirt cheap compared to Cisco. You can not honestly expect support to be in the same class.

The money number does not show the value. Who needs support if supposedly working features are indeed working as being told to do and will constantly do all that over the version changes? I can honestly expect that.

I gotten it to work by turning off HWMP+ and reverting to RSTP for path pruning. WDS is set to dynamic mesh and set to use bridge1. HWMP was causing all kinds of hell on the other MK routers in the network (rb1100+) they would all at the same time have an absolute seizure as soon as a put more than one radio plugged into any of the routers. which would crash the entire network for hours as i drove/flew to each repeater site to reset the routers

its now passing data and that end of its working. an odd effect has cropped up since doing that is the AP's and CPE's will only respond on layer 2 if directly connected to the subnet. they will not route to the management interface so turning on RSTP turning off HWMP+ has killed access via ip. ive got the ip address attached to the bridge, made the most sense that way.

I will be taking tomaskir up on his offer. There are some really weird configurations that our past consultant did that need figuring out. I come from a microwave radio tech side of things and the mikrotik firewall for some reason makes me want to run screaming. I can't understand it at all.

thank you all for your feedback, it all helped in at least getting the customers running (and quite happy i might add) so thats the main panic over with. now just need to figure out how to manage them without ip

ps. sorry about temporary abandoning this thread, got caught up in trying to get things working, one good thing came out of this is it has convinced my boss to send me for specific Mikrotik training.. off to LA I go.. hopefully it helps I'm running out of hair to pull out.

Building anything complex on top of the MT gear and stack is a gamble, always. The software is too darn unpredictable.

A few outages recently by high priced gear and yet our MT gear works with very few issues has me thinking is high priced equipment always a good choice?

I agree, I've lost more Cisco and juniper equipment in the environment we punish them in than MT. all our rb1100's see -30c - +40c no problems.

Building anything complex on top of the MT gear and stack is a gamble, always. The software is too darn unpredictable.

A few outages recently by high priced gear and yet our MT gear works with very few issues has me thinking is high priced equipment always a good choice?

I agree, I've lost more Cisco and juniper equipment in the environment we punish them in than MT. all our rb1100's see -30c - +40c no problems.

I didn't write about the price, but about the devices and software itself.

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I didn't write about the price, but about the devices and software itself.

Are you referring to all Mikrotik equipment or just wireless devices only?

.........................
I didn't write about the price, but about the devices and software itself.

Are you referring to all Mikrotik equipment or just wireless devices only?

I am mainly on wireless, but these issues are all over the board - with the wireless (NV2 and Nstreme changes tend to break these), ethernet (ex. port flapping, port speed mode selection issues) and advanced routing (with OSPF some routes will not be distributed ever, some will start to be distributed after a reboot, ...). I am very wary of implementing anything a little fancier on top of the MT because of these things. You never know when some weird bug/issue will give rise to a need for emergency rebuild of the core network. For that reason I am keeping the v6 ROS away from my core network and thus the newer Tilera boxes are off limits for me at the moment.

.........................
I didn't write about the price, but about the devices and software itself.

Are you referring to all Mikrotik equipment or just wireless devices only?

I am mainly on wireless, but these issues are all over the board - with the wireless (NV2 and Nstreme changes tend to break these), ethernet (ex. port flapping, port speed mode selection issues) and advanced routing (with OSPF some routes will not be distributed ever, some will start to be distributed after a reboot, ...). I am very wary of implementing anything a little fancier on top of the MT because of these things. You never know when some weird bug/issue will give rise to a need for emergency rebuild of the core network. For that reason I am keeping the v6 ROS away from my core network and thus the newer Tilera boxes are off limits for me at the moment.

I use 5.20 OS on my network, routed, NV2, ospf and no issues now?

All I can say this was achieved by the efforts of a professional consultant as we worked through the issues,

Port flapping has stopped after separating OSPF areas and types, cost + using loopbacks, wireless scan was simply reduced from “Default” to +/- 20Mhz above / below the AP or PTP frequency (currently using 20Mhz channel width), I have modified antenna’s to improve RF screening + more critical about placement on a mast to reduce co-location interference, removed connection tracking and packages on routers that were not required or not being used, etc….

In a nutshell – Mikrotik is very good but is not the type you can simply put up or plug in and walk away, it’s needs to be configured to suit your network requirements,

You know you should test this stuff before deploying.

ARBEIT ANGST KONSUMTERROR

You know you should test this stuff before deploying.

ARBEIT ANGST KONSUMTERROR

While testing is always a good start even after deployment issues could occur?

You know you should test this stuff before deploying.

ARBEIT ANGST KONSUMTERROR

While testing is always a good start even after deployment issues could occur?

in my case, deployment issues have definitely occured. we paid a MT consultant north of $4000.00 for this deployment plan which has failed miserably.

You know you should test this stuff before deploying.

ARBEIT ANGST KONSUMTERROR

While testing is always a good start even after deployment issues could occur?

in my case, deployment issues have definitely occured. we paid a MT consultant north of $4000.00 for this deployment plan which has failed miserably.

Was this cost for a deployment plan only or including technical support to work through the issues?
What was the sequence of events to occur and to cost this amount and fail?