Question 1:
If i have a Senao with ssid=AANAME (for example)
and i change this Senao for a MT ap... but assign the MT AP the same ssid (AANAME) as the Senao.
Will my clients automatically connect to the MT AP or I have to manually and locally connect each one???

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Question 2:
If I have in a tower with 2 Senaos with omnis with these ssid, APNUMBER1 and APNUMBER2
is it a good idea to migrate to MT using a RB532 with a Senao minipci and create an wlan with ssid APNUMBER1 and a vwlan with APNUMBER2???

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Question 3:
Do I have the same performance in this two cases??
case1--> MT AP wlan with 60 clients
case2--> MT AP with wlan with 30 clients and vwlan with 30 clients...


ps. hope you understand my english

Question 1:
If i have a Senao with ssid=AANAME (for example)
and i change this Senao for a MT ap... but assign the MT AP the same ssid (AANAME) as the Senao.
Will my clients automatically connect to the MT AP or I have to manually and locally connect each one???

---

Question 2:
If I have in a tower with 2 Senaos with omnis with these ssid, APNUMBER1 and APNUMBER2
is it a good idea to migrate to MT using a RB532 with a Senao minipci and create an wlan with ssid APNUMBER1 and a vwlan with APNUMBER2???

---

Question 3:
Do I have the same performance in this two cases??
case1--> MT AP wlan with 60 clients
case2--> MT AP with wlan with 30 clients and vwlan with 30 clients...


ps. hope you understand my english

Question1:

Most likely. They should connect to the new SSID, you may have to have them power cycle their CPE devices.

Question2:

You could do this. It depends on what you are trying to achieve. But yes this would work.

Question3:

Yes, you're not gaining/losing any performance by using VirualAP interfaces. You are increasing the load on a single mikrotik however. Which may or may not degrade service depending on the systems resources.

Also I would recommend the Atheros based chipset over PRISM. RouterOS offers more features for this chipset and in my experiences perform well.

Is there a "ping watchdog" on the client boxes ? ( this reboots the box if it can't ping the IP you tell it ), it would save you having to contact 60 people.

Question1 probably won't work.

I learned it hard way. Problem is that most of the standalone devices, when you attach them using survey option, does not lock just to SSID but to MAC of the AP too. If you change AP device and use the same SSID, MAC is different and clients do nto connect.

Is there a "ping watchdog" on the client boxes ? ( this reboots the box if it can't ping the IP you tell it ), it would save you having to contact 60 people.

i don't know what a "ping watchdog" is... i have never seen this in clients equipments.

Its just a setting that makes the box ping an IP address , if it fails say 50 times , the box will reboot

Question1 probably won't work.

I learned it hard way. Problem is that most of the standalone devices, when you attach them using survey option, does not lock just to SSID but to MAC of the AP too. If you change AP device and use the same SSID, MAC is different and clients do nto connect.

I agree

Question1 probably won't work.

I learned it hard way. Problem is that most of the standalone devices, when you attach them using survey option, does not lock just to SSID but to MAC of the AP too. If you change AP device and use the same SSID, MAC is different and clients do nto connect.

I agree

we put up an omni on all of our towers in the event that we need to reboot a sector in the middle of the day, we mirror the wireless settings from the AP, bridge it to the same VLAN as the primary AP, and then when we reboot the sector, clients re-associate to the omni (as long as they are close enough to get a decent signal) and often they are back up before their PPPoE session errors out.

I don't know what CPE's you are using, but if you have Tranzeo or MT for your CPE, then you are fine.

Question1 probably won't work.

I learned it hard way. Problem is that most of the standalone devices, when you attach them using survey option, does not lock just to SSID but to MAC of the AP too. If you change AP device and use the same SSID, MAC is different and clients do nto connect.

I agree

I disagree I just did this last night and it worked fine.

(Using Tranzeo CPE's)

It associates based on the SSID, the MAC is provided from the SSID. Unless its a WDS link then of course you have to change the MAC.

I also disagree, because this is a client feature. So it depends on your CPE. for example consider a roaming setup, where all SSIDs are identical, but the client changes APs with no problems. This works unless your client device is really dumb (or too clever?)

Question 1:
If i have a Senao with ssid=AANAME (for example)
and i change this Senao for a MT ap... but assign the MT AP the same ssid (AANAME) as the Senao.
Will my clients automatically connect to the MT AP or I have to manually and locally connect each one???

Yup it will work. I did it before, no problems.

Btw thanx for this thread, had a problem with one of my APs, and fixed it because of the advise on Virtual APs

We just tried this again for the second time and it DID NOT work.

We had an MT box with a Prism radio in it and about 20 clients connected. The clients are a mix of MT CPEs connected in station mode and Tranzeo CPEs.

We cloned the settings on the original AP and then replaced it with a new one and an SR2 card instead of the PRISM. We had the same SSID as the original. When we brought up the new box in place of the old one, none of the Tranzeo clients would remain connected. They would all show up on the wireless registration, but then would disconnect with deauth or extensive data loss messages in the log. The MT CPEs initially connected but would not pass any traffic. Then after some fiddling, we could not get any of the CPEs to connect.

We even rebooted one of the Tranzeo clients to see if it would connect after a reboot, but it would not - same issue.

We then thought that the SR2 might be incompatible with the Tranzeos, so we tried it again with a 200 mW WLM54G card made by Compex. We saw the exact same results with this new box and new card and with all the settings the same as we had with the original PRISM based box.

We even tested a Tranzeo in the shop and verified that it would associate with the new box.

What in the world is going on? How can we replace that AP and have the clients re-associate?

You most definitely have a unique situation...

We have around 200 towers/AP's with around 3000 wireless clients, and lightning regularly takes out equipment. The ONLY CPE we've come across that needs a manual re-association are Sparklans. Needless to say, we don't use them anymore.

The issue with Sparklans was the preferred BSSID (MAC) of the AP being saved... you have to manually re-associate to reset it. You may be experiencing the same issue with your Tranzeos. MT does not suffer the same pronlem.

We are using Realtek CPE boards and the association depends of SSID and MAC.

Can routerOS make MAC spoofing in AP mode? If I change one of my old AP I will need this feature...

Yes, it can - just copy & paste the old MAC into the 'wireless/general' tab in winbox...
or

/int wir set wlan mac-address=xx:yy:zz:aa:bb:cc

make sure you dump the old card... don't want to someday end up with 2 devices on your network sharing MACs!

We did try cloning the MAC on our AP, but they still would not associate.

Any other ideas?