Hi. I have an odd situation I am wondering about. I have a CRS326 in a standard type of configuration. A wan port facing the internet and switch ports on the LAN side. I also have a HAP router (RBD52G-5HacD2HnD) with its wan port on the CRS326 LAN subnet. I have a pc on this LAN subnet as well where I run winbox. Both routers running 7.7, but same behavior in the 6.49 software.

The CRS and HAP are set up so that they detect each other as neighbors. The crs shows two neighbors, the HAP and the winbox. But winbox is not seeing the hap device as a neighbor so I can't connect to it by mac address using the PC. The HAP has CRS326 as a neighbor but not winbox.

So does anyone know why winbox can't see the HAP? I can enter its ip address and winbox can connect, but I like to be able to connect by mac address if things go wrong with the ip without having to connect to the LAN switch port side of the HAP if I can. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

I dont think its healthy to think that the routers and winbox are live entities making decisions for you ;-P
Its definitely the hapacs fault and not the person doing the configuration...........

All to say without seeing the configuration I am not going to play guessing games.
Normally one puts all smart devices on the same subnet................

Are you running the Winbox PC on a LAN port of the CRS or the hAP? Your description of that is a little vague.

I noted that the HAP was on a different subnet, thence broadcast domain than the windows pc. That served not purpose I could see, so I moved the hap to the same subnet as the pc. Good news, the hap mac address shows up on the winbox list of neighbors now. It can connect fine using ip address, but cannot connect using mac address. The mac address is the one I want to get working since I go there when I goof up something to the point where I can't access it with ip address.

I am able to connect using mac address if I plug into the lan side of the hap, but not on the 'wan' side that is in the lan portion of the CRS326. I did some wireshark and noted winbox wants to talk to port 20561 which is revealed to be the port number that winbox mac address connecting uses. I added a rule on the firewall input chain on the hap to allow udp:20561 to pass. And I see the packed count increasing when winbox tries to log in.

I turned on the packet sniffer on the hap and can see winbox sending broadcasts to port 20561. But I see nothing on the packet trace showing the hap responding. On the output chain, there is simply an allow all. I also note that the stateful packet inspector shows the broadcasts in its connection table.

I also note that the hap is working properly in its role as a router as far as local network traffic goes.

I have done a lot of googling and see nothing responsive to this circumstance, and no fixes offer that work. So... wondering if anyone knows why the hap is not responding to winbox sending traffic to its input chain. Is there some sort of filtering at layer 2 that I don't know about?

To close the loop on this. When looking at the command line documentation for other reasons, I stumbled across a setting under tools where the allowable source interfaces for mac based webfig. I changed it from lan to all and now I am able to connect to the interior router using mac address.