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millenium7
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CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Wed May 03, 2023 4:00 am

I looked this into a while ago and couldn't find an elegant solution, so here goes again incase I just missed something obvious

How can I make CAPSMAN AP's work like every single other wifi device out there on the market, and have both 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio's be treated like a single network? Not the same SSID, but the same layer2 broadcast domain. Because as far as I can tell I can't do this when its not in local forwarding mode. 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio's are treated as entirely separate interfaces
The workaround I could find is bridge them at the CAPSMAN controller, but this is not what I call elegant or efficient because - correct me if i'm wrong - I then need to create a separate bridge for each and every apartment (to avoid traffic going between different rooms), and broadcast/multicast traffic routes from the AP, through to the controller, and then back to the AP on the other interface. Rather than staying locally on the AP

Put another way, can the 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio's be bridged at the AP? rather than at the controller?
I essentially want CAP forwarding mode, the only difference is I want 2.4ghz and 5ghz bridged together and treated like a single forwarding interface rather than 2 separate ones
 
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mkx
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Wed May 03, 2023 6:58 pm

When using CAPsMAN forwarding (for any reason), you actually require that all traffic passes CAPsMAN. Which includes traffic between different radios (of the same CAP) as well as traffic between radio and wired port of same CAP. So if you would like to pass traffic between different radios of same CAP locally, you'll have to use local forwarding (which is, BTW, at this time the only option in capsman2). If you'd like to separate traffic from different CAPs, then configure each in separate VLAN and then route betwern different VLANs as desired.
 
millenium7
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Thu May 04, 2023 4:01 am

Not a great solution either way, i'm hoping CAPSMAN gets a complete overhaul and rewritten from the ground up with the concept of multiple radio's and ease of management in mind. It seems to me that it was never designed that way, and assumed only a single radio was ever going to be present. As a result it creates exponentially more work and sub optimal traffic flow
 
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Thu May 04, 2023 10:48 pm

I would say that your use scenario (local forwarding within single device, capsman forwarding for the rest) is a niche use case.

You have to remember that capsman, as far as CAP devices go, only provisions wireless interfaces. Then, if capsman forwarding is enabled, it also creates tunnels to bring wireless interfaces to capsman. But in no scenario does capsman configure bridge filtering or ip routing or whatever would be needed for functionality wou want to see working.

Again, there are a few ways to do something like you want, but not using capsman forwarding, and with manual config ... because your use case is a niche use case.
 
millenium7
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 1:50 am

It's not niche at all, it's really quite a simple concept and extremely common to have both 2.4ghz and 5ghz treated like the same layer2 segment, so that when you have devices connected on both bands they can still communicate with each other, and not forcefully have to switch bands. This is the way its handled in the practically every other vendors environment, it's just not the way CAPSMAN was built

Every other vendor makes it very simple, treat the AP and all radio's like a single entity. And when you want to get granular then you have the option to separate them as needed
 
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 2:52 am

The workaround I could find is bridge them at the CAPSMAN controller, but this is not what I call elegant or efficient because - correct me if i'm wrong - I then need to create a separate bridge for each and every apartment (to avoid traffic going between different rooms)
I'm not completely sure that I understand what you want, but the bridge "Horizon" setting controls whether packets are allowed to move from one bridge port to another. If you have one port going to a 2.4GHz interface and another going to a 5GHz interface, you can set the horizon for both to the same value (ex. "1") to prevent packets from being forwarded between those two bridge ports. The bridge interface itself, or bridge ports with no horizon setting or a different horizon setting, will still be able to communicate with both bridge ports. You can even configure the horizon in the CAPsMAN datapath settings.
 
millenium7
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 3:53 am

Not sure why this is not a clear concept so i'll try again

Here's what i'd like to be able to do: Take any MikroTik AP directly out of the box with no configuration, plug it into a network and have CAPSMAN configure it with the details of the room it resides in
Following me so far? The same as any other AP on the planet that has a controller
Here's the problem: I'm Joe and i'm sitting in Room 123 and I join the network the network of MyHotel123 with my phone, Internet works no worries. Now I connect the TV to the same network of MyHotel123, it too has internet and works fine, yet I can't stream to it from my phone. Why? Because the TV only supports 2.4ghz, and my phone is connected to the 5ghz radio. They are treated as entirely separate layer2 segments. If I force my phone to connect to 2.4ghz then it works just fine

Make sense? Because I can do this with literally any other vendor effortlessly. Why? because by default both 2.4ghz and 5ghz radio's get put into a common bridge. Except in the world of CAPSMAN where they don't they remain as separate interfaces. That's literally the only thing I need to happen
 
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 4:15 am

If you want each room to have its own network so that devices can communicate with others in the same room, a VLAN per room might be a better solution than multiple bridges.
 
millenium7
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 4:20 am

If you want each room to have its own network so that devices can communicate with others in the same room, a VLAN per room might be a better solution than multiple bridges.
If there's only a dozen rooms perhaps, when there's 200 rooms that's 200 vlans to configure across a bunch of switches, 200 subnets, 200 DHCP ranges, 200 filter rules to prevent routing anywhere other than internet etc etc it's a pain in the dickens. As is local forwarding mode because capsman can't push all required config for traffic flow hence each AP needs manual config
Which comes back to my original point, CAPSMAN works fine if it's just a single 2.4ghz radio, but that's just not practical anymore

Every other vendor makes this very straightforward and simple
 
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 4:23 am

If there's only a dozen rooms perhaps, when there's 200 rooms that's 200 vlans to configure across a bunch of switches, 200 subnets, 200 DHCP ranges etc etc it's a pain in the dickens.
Switches? If you are using CAPsMAN forwarding mode, why do you need to set up all these VLANs on switches? And yes, there would need to be 200 subnets and 200 DHCP ranges, but you can script the creation of those to make it easier. Once they are there, it is done.
 
millenium7
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 4:33 am

Or....... I could use any other vendor and it just works without all the fluff

The reason for capsman forwarding mode is it's the only one that allows hands-off provisioning
Local forwarding mode still requires logging into the AP and manually creating the bridge interface and assigning the interfaces to it. I don't want any intervention on the SM side, the entire thing should be configured from a controller otherwise it largely defeats the purpose of a controller
 
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 4:40 am

The reason for capsman forwarding mode is it's the only one that allows hands-off provisioning
Local forwarding mode still requires logging into the AP and manually creating the bridge interface and assigning the interfaces to it. I don't want any intervention on the SM side, the entire thing should be configured from a controller otherwise it largely defeats the purpose of a controller
I normally use local forwarding mode for everything, and don't generally have to touch the APs at all. When you take a new AP out of the box and boot it into CAP mode, it should already have a bridge, find the CAPsMAN, and automatically add the wireless interfaces to the bridge. What are you having to do manually?
 
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mkx
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Re: CAPSMAN - Config to bridge 2.4 and 5ghz together?

Fri May 05, 2023 3:38 pm

Or....... I could use any other vendor and it just works without all the fluff

Actually it's the other vendor that has the fluff ... MT lets you do anything, but indeed not in simple way.

And, BTW, MT by default adds all wireless devices to same bridge (either to CAP's bridge if local forwarding is enabled or to CAPsMAN's bridge of choice when capsman forwarding is enabled) in which case 2.4GHz clients are free to communicate with 5GHz clients ... over which ever bridge configured to be used.

What is a niche use case (even if you don't admit it, but there's only a certain number of hotels on this globe while number of small businesses and homes exceeds that number by far) is that you want to pass some traffic with local forwarding and some traffic with capsman forwarding (and next request will be to pass even some traffic between a randomly chosen pair of APs directly, bypassing capsman, ... because they happen to cover same presidential suite). Which, as explained, is possible, but you don't want to do the job yourself, you're expecting MT to do it for you in some miraculous way.

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