Hello everyone,

Wanted to ask you for an opinion regarding my routers. I have 2 hAP ac lite in my environment. One of them is the main router which is connected with modem and switch. For the other one would be best to configure it as WiFi range extender or to configure it as AP with different range of IP address then the main one? I want to use the second router only for WiFi, no devices will be connected with this.

Thanks in advance

To avoid a lot of headache and troubleshooting, it will be much better to link up the two hAP's via ethernet and setup CAPsMAN on the main router.

I've a similar setup and I opted to configure the second unit as "LAN extender" ... in the following manner:

• I'm using 2.4GHz wifi for clients and 5GHz wifi for PtP connection between both units. Note that hAP ac lite has only single chain on 5GHz so it doesn't offer any performance gain compared to 2-chain 2.4GHz wifi (40MHz channel on 2.4GHz versus 80MHz channel on 5GHz), I went with this setup to maximize client wifi coverage as 5GHz reach is enough to have stable 100Mbps connection between the units
• all LAN functionality (DHCP and DNS) is done by first unit, the second one is only AP with same SSID and security profile
• there are also wired clients connected to the second unit, all interfaces (all ether as well as both wireless) are members of same bridge on the second unit. On the first unit it is similar except for the ether interface used as WAN interface.
• while any of supported wifi protocols (802.11, nstreme and nv2) can be used for PtP connection in this kind of setup, I decided to go with nstreme. While it natively supports "bridge" operation it offers some level of security just because not every script kiddy can eavesdrop the communication. On the other hand it still is detected by 802.11 devices (allowing to avoid using same channel) unlike nv2 which is stealth for 802.11 devices

This will work? I'll try.

It should work, it works for me.

A few hints: first configure the router ... after everything works for wired clients and 2.4GHz clients (if that's the band to be used for AP), proceed with configuration of "wifi bridge" on 5GHz (if that's the band to be used for PtP connection). Wireless mode should be set to "bridge" and set wireless protocol to "nstreme" (or whichever you chose). I recommend to have dedicated security profile and SSID different than on "normal" AP. When wlan2 (the wifi PtP) interface seems to be configured, add it to bridge with other LAN ports (wired and wifi).
For the unit that is going to be extender set wireless mode on 5GHz interface to "station bridge" and wireless protocol to "nv2 nstreme 802.11"... this way, if you decide to go with another protocol, you change it on "master" device and the extender will follow. The same goes with frequency: you might want to set it on master unit, but leave it set to "auto" on extender. Disable DHCP server on extender, clients should be able to get their assignments from master unit.

Be sure that security profiles and other settings (e.g. SSID, channel width ...) on both units match.

If everything goes fine, extender could fetch its own IP address using DHCP client. However I advise to configure static IP so that management access to extender (via ts wireless or wired ports) works even if PtP connection doesn't work.