I'm trying to use a routerboard as a mini-POP. Once prism card to link back to a main tower AP, the second to server as an AP at the mini-POP.

I've done this before when the main tower AP was Mikrotik - in that case I made the bridge radio "bridge" and used WDS. Works like a charm.

But, for this mini-POP it needs to link back to a non-Mikrotick (no WDS support) AP. So I set the bridge radio to "station". It links up fine and the Routerboard can get on the network. But from a PC connected to the Ethernet port I can't get out on the network (yes I did bridge the interfaces!).

ARP is making it's way across as when I ping from the network to the PC it resolves the MAC, but icmp traffic is not passed. The resolved MAC is the PCs actual MAC - I think that is the problem. I am used to AP "clients" which do bridging - substituting the CPEs MAC for the clients (so the AP only ever sees the CPEs MAC).

I'm sure I could get this working by routing instead of bridging, but that is not what I need.

Suggestions?

- Frank

I don't think you will be able to bridge with a non-WDS AP. The only possibility would be to do Ethernet over IP from your local Routerboard to another MT router on upstream somewhere.

I think it used to work with v2.3 or v2.4 but they removed it, do not ask me why because my memory is quite vague on this (oh and we used RadioLAN interfaces back then).

_// Sten Daniel Sørsdal

You cannot bridge IEEE802.11 stations because of limitation of the standard - an AP only accepts packets from a station which has the same MAC address that the station has. Some manufacturers implement a workaroud to this problem by masquerading MAC addresses of the computers behind it (i.e., all that computers will go with the same MAC address), but that leads to numerous network problems (including DHCP not working as it cannot distinguish all that computers behind such a bridge). As this workaround is heavily flawed and creates some misterious problems, it is not implemented in RouterOS.