📗MikroTik MTCNA - Wireless AP & Client Configuration

hello and welcome back in this video we will be looking at how to configure an access point on microtech as well as the various options on the device as well as setting up a wireless client to an access point so let's dive into the video alrighty so i've got two physical pieces of equipment that i'm going to lab with i've actually got the 951 that i'm going to set up as an access point that we've done a lot of labbing with on previous videos and then i've got a small little hap mini that i actually got from a mum earlier this year or last year even wow time flies that we'll be setting up as an access point client so i'm going to just maximize the ap so that we can actually get into the configuration so if we want to look at the wireless we can actually just click on this wireless button and this gives us all of the wireless options that we can work with so we can set up wireless interfaces or enable them but this is disabled by default if you're running the default config array or no default configuration with default configuration will be enabled but it might be bridged with all of your lan interfaces but this wireless tables gives you all of the different tabs that you can go into and we'll go into a lot of these tabs to set up additional config to show you how everything works but for the most part you just need to understand there is the wireless interfaces and i've got a wlan interface on this microtick and it actually shows us the type and what this type is it means the wireless card that's actually running on the microtic because each card is obviously different it might have different antennas or different chains or can it has more throughput or less throughput or it can operate at different bands and that that is why the type is actually very important but let me just enable this wireless interface so i've got a wlan one interface now i can double click on it and we can treat this like an ethernet interface it's just able to broadcast frames wirelessly so it does have a mac address it can do arp and people actually connect onto this wireless interface with this wlan interface when it's set up as an access point so right now this interface is just searching for something it's just searching so let's try and set something up by going onto the wireless tab and then if i click here we can see there are different modes that you can set up now the modes that i would say that's most relevant to us would be the ap ap bridge bridge station and even station bridge all of these other interfaces they have their uses as well but primarily i want you to focus on the ap bridge and bridge as well as the station and station bridge the reason i'm calling this out is the ap bridge is actually where you put your micro tick in an ap mode so that different clients can connect to it whereas if you just set it to the bridge mode that means a single client can connect to it to form a bridge and it will still work as an access point but this is more for just bridging a connection so we're going to use the ap bridge for the access point and now from here we can actually select a band so we can say at which speeds would we like to operate how how much frequency can we use so i'm going to set this for 2 gigahertz g slash n because i know that will give me the most throughput but actually let's set it for bgn for older devices that might want to connect that can't use g or n but they might have b available to them all right if i had an additional card on this micro tick there might have been a wlan 2 and it might have operated at 5 gigahertz and then we'd be able to set those options for 5 gigahertz okay now we can set the channel width which just means how big the channel is that we're broadcasting so that people can connect and the higher we set this the more throughput we can get typically it will be at 20 megahertz uh but if you want to set it to like 20 40 you can do that but note that it can cause instability on the wireless network so if your channel is too big it might run into more interference and then people will maybe have some speed issues but let's leave it on 20 megahertz for this test and now we can set the frequency now you can see we get various different frequencies that we can set our um band to you can think of these just as the channel so this first one is channel one and this increments by five so i know channel one is typically a clean channel so one three four five six is also typically a clean channel so we could use that or we could use eleven so two four six two so these are the channels we might use to connect i'll just leave this on the default channel which is channel one but you could set it to auto and the micro tick would try and find the channel that's the cleanest to connect to that doesn't have as much interference just to give you some better performance but let me just set that to two four one two for our demonstration now we've got an ssid now this is important because this is the ssid that the micro tick will broadcast out the clients can connect to when clients scan for a wireless network they'll be able to see the ssid be it on their computer or on a different micro tick and they'd be able to select that asus id to connect with so let's maybe make this tnb dash wi-fi security profile so if i look at those tabs at the back there's actually a security profile there and this is where you can set the password details for clients trying to connect so we will update that in a second as well so i'll leave this on default and we can change the default one but you can create custom profiles it doesn't always need to be the default profile we get a wps mode so this is if you want to basically have a button on the microtic to enable certain features you can push this to turn on wps but i'm not going to tweak anything here i'm going to leave this as default and now we get some important information as well so we've got a frequency mode which is the regulatory domain so if we look at the frequencies that we can connect to if you select this for regulatory domain this will basically look at which frequencies are acceptable in your country to you so if i set my country i'll i'll set this to south africa because that's where i'm from but if you're in a different country i do recommend setting your country so that the frequencies for your country will be acceptable so that you can use those frequencies if you just leave it um you know if you just leave it blank then you might use the wrong frequencies you might get into trouble but um if you put your country and you put the regulatory domain which is default you you should be fine when it comes to frequency now we can also change the frequency mode by manual tx power super channel or the regulatory domain if we do the manual tx power we can actually also set the power for the marketing how strong it can broadcast the signal out but this can also potentially cause issues so i don't want to say don't do it if you leave it on the defaults everything should work fine but if you have a requirement maybe the ap is a bit further away from the clients than usual then you can tweak up the power a little bit just to get that signal out a bit further and then also just provide more bandwidth but we'll look at that in a second all right and this is actually very basic what you can do to set up as an access point now i'd like us to go through a few of the other tabs and such before we apply the configuration all right so let's look at the other tabs that we get and what i'd like to focus on first is when we're in our wireless interface there's actually an advanced mode that you can go into now this advanced mode is really really important because it allows you to see additional features and functions on your micro tick as well because if i leave it in the simple mode you see there's not a lot of stuff that i can change here but if i do advanced mode we get some additional info so i could even change the radio name so that other clients when they scan for the network and they see the radio name they might see something else so i might make this tmb now as well we've got additional stuff like the wireless protocol that we can set so we can leave it as any or it can be 802.11 and then you get stuff called in stream so in-stream is more or less a micro-tick proprietary protocol i won't say that that you can't use it maybe if you want to use it use nv2 in-stream and 802.11 or leave it on any but what nv2 in-stream or in stream allows you to do is it marketing bypasses some of the stuff from 802.11 just to increase throughput a little bit but this is only functional between microtic to microtick if you're going to use n-stream you can't use it from a micro-tick to let's say ubiquity dish or something it's not going to work but i'll put it on as nv2 in stream 802.11 for this and now we can set a few additional stuff here you can also say is the installation is it indoor outdoor obviously if it's indoor it's probably an ap that's in a room somewhere if it's outdoor it might be you having a wireless point-to-point link or something that you want to connect with but i'll put this as indoor because this is where it is and then we can set some additional stuff like vlan tags and service tags and whatnot but this is what happens when you click on the advanced button but not only does more stuff appear in the wireless section there's actually additional tabs that come up as well now the data rates you can also manually configure them you can set which speeds are supported so let's say people connect with uh b so 802.11 b we can actually say okay everybody click that can only get 11 megabits but that can potentially cause issues as well because if there is some signal issue maybe they might experience packet loss if they're all just connecting at the fastest speed uh then we've got this ht tab which is basically showing you the chains that's on your microtic so this is effectively the think of this as the antennas that's on the microtic that's sending and receiving signals so chain zero and chain one can can transmit and chain zero chain one can also receive on each respective chain so i've got basically two um polarizing let's say antennas even though there's no antenna on the micro tick it's just how the card operates so there's two chains on this specific model if you have a different model because this can vary from micro technic you might see more uh chains which would then again allow you for more throughput because if you've got like this this beast of around it doesn't even need to be a router board it can be and just an access point you know it could be a dish or something it can have like 20 antennas and it looks like a monster from it looks like the loch ness monster or a dragon or something and this thing is just so beefy and if it connects to another device that also supports that type of connectivity you can definitely see a bit more throughput with that i'd like to see go just to the in stream as well so here you can go to actually enable in stream you can also disable the csma which i don't know if that's really a good thing to do but you can typically do that just to stop checking for collisions effectively now we can also set the tx power as i mentioned so if i set this to manual i can actually say how much power i want to allocate and like i said if you want to push a bit harder that's how you can do it but again do this maybe at your own discretionary risk because you can potentially pop something if if you tweak the power incorrectly here's our current tx power tab so this just shows us what's currently running what's currently been set so i'm just going to set this back to the default and now i can see your status and traffic so status it works just like your normal ethernet interfaces you can see if it interfaces up or down or what's happening with it and then your traffic is just a traffic graph so you can see how much traffic is actually going over it okay so that clears up all of the different tabs and settings and such that we can tweak and tune so let's actually get the access point up and running all right so i was happy with the configuration how it was so i'll just apply this and then what i'd like to do is just go into our security profiles and then we're going to set a password because we need to also set a mode i might say we want to use dynamic keys and then i could say we're going to use wpa psk so this is the original version but you can set it for wpa2 psk maybe let's set it for that and now we can set a pre-shared key so i'm going to make this something very default and i think you need to make this eight characters but i see one two three four five six seven eight all right i've made it a very basic password i do recommend you make your password a bit more secure but now we can apply this and now we've got a username or a password that people can actually use to authenticate with so this covers the access point portion let's quickly go to our client so i'm going to minimize this and go back to my client which is this little hap mini and i'm going to go to my wireless tab here and here i've got my wlan interface i can enable this and now that this has been enabled i'm going to double click on this actually before we do that let's go to our security profiles and from here i also just want to set a password quickly so i want to because this is where i'm specifying the password now that's going to be used to connect to the access point all right let's go back to our wi-fi interfaces i'll double click on the interface go to my wireless and now i've got options to set it to station or station bridge i'm going to set this to station bridge so that we could potentially bridge the connection later on in another video but this is how you can set it to station bridge station is effectively just a client this is just a a host connecting wirelessly to another access point but i'm going to make mine station bridge now we can select which band do we want to connect that so i did say 2 gigahertz b g and n so that's what i'm going to select we did have it as 20 megahertz our frequency this was channel 1 our ssid so this is important i have no clue what it was i can't remember what it was so marketing actually has a very nice feature where you can click on this little scan button and if i scan the wireless network i can actually pick up i can pick up there is a wireless device here it's called tmb wi-fi that's the channel it's on this is the signal strength there's a radio name this is so cool i love the scanner and if i hover over that we can actually see this active it's a running router os it's tdma and it's bridge okay so i'm just going to select that and i'm going to click connect so now that i've clicked connect to that if i go back here we can actually see it's put in the tmb wi-fi there and that's it that's how easy it is i've got my security profile selected already so i'll just apply that and i could see in the background it actually already connected there was that little r there so i can see this actually or this client is connecting to my ap i know for a fact this is working and if i go to my ip neighbors i can actually see the wlan has a connection to my router board and if i go back to the access point just to verify the connection if i go to my registration i can actually see the clients that have registered that have connected and there i can see this client has connected and this is the data rate it currently has so don't think that is just what it is it just kind of changes depending on what the tcp windowing is doing so if i try and push traffic across the network we might definitely see this push a bit higher let's actually do that because right now i've only got layer two working so again wireless in its own it's a layer two concept it's frames from wireless cards being broadcasted to each other over radio frequency so if i go to my interfaces it's just an interface but right now i don't have any ip addressing configured on either device so let's add device or eyepiece to our wlan interfaces so let's make it something very basic 172 16 0.1 i'll just put it as a slash 30. actually let's let's make that a big nice slash 24 network because maybe we'll add some more access points to play around with later and our interface is wlan1 i'll apply that and i'll go to my client and remember you can do this with dhcp as well you can set up at the hcp server set the wlan interface as the server let's actually do that let's do that we we don't even need to worry about this so let's go back to our ap and let's set up the http quickly so i'm going to do ipdhcp server let's run the wizard so it's very quick i'll select wlan as my interface there's my address range network pull let's add the dns servers 8.8.8.8 and now i've got a dhcp server running now let's just quickly add a dhcp client on our ap so i'll go into my ip dhcp client i'll set this up against my wlan one i'll add a default route out and there we can see i've obtained the ip address of one seven two sixteen zero two five four and dot one should be my gateway so let's just check our status that is correct and if i ping across the micro text now so this is from micro tick from client one to ap1 over the wireless so if i ping 192. sorry wrong ip 170 160.1 i actually see i've got three milliseconds latency which is quite nice that's actually not bad for wireless um but let's do something that's actually going to test the connection so from the client i'm just going to run a quick bandwidth test to 172 160.1 and i'll make it let's make it udp tcp won't drop any packet so we might not see a true reflection and let's start this test so i forgot to set the user as admin now we should connect and now we can see the bandwidth is starting to go across so there's some six seven megabits but we can see this is going to climb and if i jump back to my ap and i look at my registration we can see the radio at which frequency or which band is actually running so how much bandwidth we're actually pushing across now so that's quite nice i really enjoy this and let's just check our traffic on the interface itself so here's the interface monitor so this is how the bandwidth is being pushed this is our tx and rx so this looks good i'm quite happy with this we've set up a very basic access point as well as client and in the next lectures we'll do some more advanced stuff as well play around with some in-stream stuff and look at all of the other tabs that we went through earlier so thanks for watching and catch in the next video bye you

Channel: The Network Berg

Views: 995

Keywords: #MTCNA, #MTCRE, #MTCINE, #Access Point, #Wireless Client

Id: X99tQE_bD7A

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021