Frustration

So I’m not sure whether to be annoyed at Apple, Mikrotik, Atheros or Broadcom this time. Probably a little of each.

The WAP works, it’s quite a nice little box and once you get used to it RouterOS is very nice to use, easy to set up and generally peachy. However, my MBP apparently doesn’t like to talk to it using 802.11n. There are two slightly odd issues, the first being that IPv6 autoconf seems to get into an endless loop of sending router solicitations every 60 seconds or so. The interface seems to lose its IPv6 address during this process, causing loss of connectivity for a second or two.

The other issue is that every 5-20 minutes the interface will go into a non-responsive state. OSX continues to show the WLAN interface as connected but IP traffic ceases to function as desired.

This only happens on 802.11n, if the AP is set to use g-only mode then it works flawlessly. It only happens on this AP, the crappy Edimax ones work fine (though with their own IPv6 issue). It doesn’t happen with this AP and another Macbook (though that has an Atheros WLAN card, whereas mine is a Broadcom).

Currently I have it configured in g-only mode, which works but of course not at the blindingly fast speeds to which we have become accustomed.

Further work on it is needed.

In other news I’ve decided to return the Netgear switch. It’s not a terrible bit of kit, and if I really needed VLANs for some reason it’d not be a bad choice. However I really don’t. I’m going to implement the guest network using an IPsec tunnel back to the router and spend the money that the switch cost on getting some old Cisco kit for a networking lab.