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vmajor
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Failover from wired to bridged wireless

Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:29 am

Good day,

I have 109-8G-1S-2HnD-IN wireless router switch. WAN is supplied through ETH1, with a LAN connection to a fiber to the home ONT box (I have no access to it). I obtain the internet connection via PPPoE to the ISP via a VLAN.

The PPPoE/fiber connection is not as reliable as I would like, so I have a watchdog running pinging 8.8.8.8 with a reboot if there is no reply. Rebooting the router sometimes speeds up the link recovery. Recently even the ONT has started crashing and as I am on a residential contract the FTTH infrastructure provider (different to the PPPoE ISP) is not likely to replace the ONT. I can recover by manually power cycling the ONT, or by telling the infrastructure provider to reset it remotely.

Thus, I want to set up an internet connection failover to another internet connection provided wirelessly by another router, a VDSL modem from another ISP. If I am on site this will allow me to continue my work while the fiber connection is restored, and if I am not on site I can reboot my MikroTik router remotely, or request an ONT reset from the FTTH provider.

Is it possible to use the wireless capability of my MikroTik switch to establish an on-demand bridge to the wireless router while maintaining its function as a wireless AP? If I cannot maintain both the bridge and the AP at the same time, I also have MikroTik HAP AC2 that I can bridge to the VDSL router permanently, and use it to provide internet connectivity through ETH7 for example, on demand.

V.
 
pe1chl
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Re: Failover from wired to bridged wireless

Wed Aug 04, 2021 12:53 pm

Yes, you can do that with a little re-configuration.
You will now have an interface like "wlan1" in your wireless which you have set up as the AP. It is probably member of "bridge".
Note the configuration details of the wireless interface (e.g. SSID, security profile etc) and remove it from the bridge.
Now re-configure wlan1 to be a station rather than the AP, and connect it to your second network. Put a DHCP client on it to get an address. Probably you want to set a default route distance on that, so your wireless link does not immediately become the new default route.
Check that this works.
Once the wlan1 is connected to the second network, you can create a new "virtual" wireless interface with wlan1 as the parent, and configure that as your AP.
(use the config you noted earlier)
Also make that new interface member of your bridge.

You can now configure whatever failover mechanism you like between your fiber and your second network connection at wlan1.

Of course you need to do all of this from a system connected to ethernet, not to your wireless (because you will temporarily lose that during reconfig).
And: when your wireless link to the second system fails (e.g. because that VDSL modem is off or out of reach), your wireless AP will become unusable. It will only work when that connection is up (because it is the master, and the AP is the slave).
 
vmajor
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Posts: 8
Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2018 6:14 am

Re: Failover from wired to bridged wireless

Fri Aug 13, 2021 10:13 am

Thank you for this. I will try to set this up when I get some time and a time off work so that I can work on this without having to have any internet connectivity in case of inevitable screwups.

V

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