MikroTik

I currently have a hAP ax³ as my main router. For the short time I have had it I mostly love it. When I was troubleshooting an issue with a Raspberry Pi Zero w 2 I learned a few things.

1) I need to learn more about Router OS.

2) I need to learn without interrupting the wireless signal used by my elderly mom. She needs her YouTube.

3) I was trying to fix an issue that was not router or Raspberry Pi related but is an issue with IWD in the Linux kernel that has been around for years.

I am looking to get a hAP ac lite to use as my learning and testing router. Since I will mainly be using Raspberry Pis this is all I need for connection speeds. Is there a guide on how to connect the hAP ac lite over wireless to the hAP ax³ as they will be in different rooms and running a cable would not be a good solution.

You will need to put one of the wifi interfaces on the ac lite into station mode, and use the same SSID and security settings on it as you do on ax3, so that it connects to the WiFi network of your ax3. You will probably want to remove that wifi interface from the default bridge, add it to the WAN interface address list and create a DHCP client on it, so that the ax3 acts as a sort of wireless ISP for it. If you hadn't altered your ax3's IP address and DHCP server setup, you will need to do so on the ac lite, so that the networks are different. Specifically, you will need to choose a different network (e.g. 192.168.77.0/24), give the ac lite an IP address on it (e.g. 192.168.77.1) and alter the default DHCP server and IP pool settings, so that the DHCP server knows it's running on this network, and uses IP address from that network (e.g. 192.168.77.128-192.168.77.254). As for how to actually do it, there's some insight that can be gleamed form this documentation page.

Thank you very much. Once the new router arrives I will go ahead and start learning what I am doing. I am sure I will have future questions as I go.

As a side note, a word of warning, the hap AC lite is a 16 Mb device, updating the ROS (v7) on it may be more complex than on other devices, do search the forum about the matter BEFORE attempting an OS upgrade on it, it may be needed to do a netinstall.

Well, (1) you don't have to update it to ROS7, and (2) the update process is usually smooth for default-ish configs, in my experience with 16 MB devices. In any case, there's netinstall, which revives 99,999% of MikroTik devices from their early graves. And, well, not having a config backup is a great learning experience, if that's what OP's after

By the way, about config backups, you can use


on RouterOS 6 or


on RouterOS 7 to generate a file on the router called 'config.rsc' that contains a sequence of commands that will configure the router back to the state it's currently in, in case you screw something up and need to reset it. You can download the file and keep it on your PC, so that you have, well, a backup, in case of an oopsie. You can also upload any file to the router and execute it as a sequence of commands with


Note that, to bring the router to a previous state with a config script, you need to reset it to a state with no configuration and then use winbox accessing the router via a MAC address to import the config.