Hi,

We’ve got a number of Mitsubishi Aircons with Wifi Adapters (558IF and 559IFs). These have worked fine for years with a couple of Apple Airport Extremes. They can only be configured through WPS.

For a couple of years I’ve had some UniFi APs. These have been fine, but the Aircon adapters would never associate with them. If I recreated the same network (SSID & Passphrase) on the UniFi devices then everything else moved across seamlessly, but these Aircon adapters wouldn’t associate. UniFi doesn’t support WPS so I couldn’t rerun the association process directly with them. This meant I’ve had to keep to Airports running to keep the Wifi Aircons running.

I’ve just bought a HAP AX lite to see if MikroTik would work with them - the plan being to move everything to MikroTik APs if it worked. But I seem to be hitting a similar problem as the UniFi APs when I recreate the existing network, and the WPS process won’t successfully complete.

I’ve set up as basic network as I can - WPA2/CCMP only, 802.11g (have tried n and ax as well). I’ve tried PMKID enabled and disabled, and Management Protection enabled and disabled.

If I recreate the existing network the AC adapters are associated with, then they start to associate but after a few seconds they disconnect. Everything else moves across fine, so I’m confident the SSID and PSK are correct. Those errors are: Or


If I rerun the WPS process for a new network by hitting WPS Accept in Webfig, I get the following error in the logs

This one I’m at a bit of a loss at - not sure why it’s ‘disassociated due to WPS’ when I’m actively trying to use WPS to get them to connect.

If anyone’s got any guidance on security settings I could change to get the existing network to connect, or can see something I’m doing wrong with WPS, any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

I would try no security for starters. Start from the bottom.
Then add WPA, TKIP, no ccmp.
If that still works, increase security from there.

Once it works, define a separate SSID and make sure it can not communicate with the rest of your network (VLAN) except for the needed pieces.

Perhaps set the mac address of the wifi interface to the same as the airport and see if it likes that.
(Turn off the airport)

Ok, I’ve made some progress with this - but it’s still not working.

Firstly, thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately they didn’t make any progress.

- You can’t use WPS on an open network (so I can’t completely turn off security).
- The Airports (the only other device I have at the moment that sets WPS on the aircons correctly) don’t have a pure WPA/TKIP option - so they always set WPA2/CCMP by the looks of things.
- Tried changing the MAC address of the MikroTik wireless interface to match the Airport - no effect.

I then realised that RouterOS has a WPS Client feature - and Lo and behold that gets the information from the Airports as well. What appears to be happening is the Airports don’t share the PSK that you set - instead the Passphrase was a random 64 character string. So, that’s it I thought - except setting the PSK of the SSID to this 64 character string in Router OS for the SSID still didn’t work.

Rerunning the WPS Client returned a different 64 character string for the PSK. Assuming the Passphrase is the plain text PSK, it looks like the Airports share a different PSK on each and every WPS attempt. That means I can’t recover the PSK the airport shared with the aircon unit this way. I think that explains the key handshake errors when I used the ‘normal’ PSK for that SSID. But if that is the case, I don’t understand how setting the WPS on one Apple Airport means the Aircon units can associate with any of the Apple Airports?

So, the easiest thing to do is get the aircon units to connect with WPS to the Mikrotiks directly. I’m still not sure why this isn’t working. The WPS connection attempt to the Airports is very reliable - start the process, press the button on the aircon unit and it gets detected. At the moment the logs seem to indicate the WPS process is starting on the HAP AX when I click WPS Accept, but it’s not completing the process. Anybody have any ides what the problem might be?

I’m coming to the conclusion that WPS is not working on the HAP AX Lite on 7.14.

I have a WPS WiFi printer, so I’ve tried to connect that to the HAP AX lite using WPS. It has the same problem as the Aircon adapters.

When I hit WPS on the printer and on the HAP AX, it clearly starts the handshake - the printer goes from ‘Waiting for WPS Pairing’ to ‘Connecting to WPS Router’ - but this never completes and times out. There are no relevant errors in the debug logs. If I try and pair the Aircon Units and the printer at the same time, the WPS process on the HAP AX immediately stops with ‘multiple clients trying to connect’ - so its clearly seeing both.

I’ve tried resetting the HAP AX back to Factory defaults, installing it as a standard router and then repeating the WPS process. The same thing happens - neither the Aircons or the Printer will complete the process. I’ve also tried initiating WPS from Webfig, Quickset and the terminal, as well as changing the radio to 802.11g from ax but keeping all other defaults the same.

Is anybody else able to join a WPS client to a HAP AX lite running 7.14?

I’ve downgraded the HAP AX to its factory firmware to see if that changed anything (7.6). WPS is still not connecting, but I am getting more meaningful error messages in the log as follows:
I’ve tried different combinations of WPA and WPA2, TKIP and CCMP - and I get the same messages each time. This applies to both the printer and the AC units using WPS.

If you have an older device that runs the wireless package, you could experiment with that. It has a lot more tweaky options.

Hi All,

Ok, just as an update on this. As per rplant’s suggestion, I got hold of an AP lite that was running 6.49.10. I set this up so I can simply use it to program the Aircons and the Printer with the correct SSID and Passphrase over WPS - and it all worked! I now have all of the devices on the correct SSID without having to use the Apple Airports.

Main take aways are:
- The HAP AX lite on factory firmware or latest firmware isn’t working with WPS over these devices. I’m not sure if this is a firmware thing (the HAP lite was running a much older version), a driver thing (the HAP lite uses the older driver package, not qcom) or an actual chipset thing. When I get a moment I will update the HAP Lite to the latest RouterOS and see if WPS still works. My hunch here is that WPS is broken for a lot of devices on the AX.

- Some Wireless APs use a randomised passphrase rather than the SSIDs standard passphrase when using WPS (looking at you Apple Airports). This all appears undocumented - I can’t find anything on the net that describes that some APs do this.

Cool...

One thought about the randomised password, you could connect your laptop to the airport using wps and once connected.
From a command prompt use:

netsh wlan show profile /?

View the password, is it the same (if different my guess is that it will probably some function of mac address)