A Few Steps to a Simple Network
I finally had the opportunity to sit down with a new customer installation and write out step by step how to configure a simple wireless network using the MikroTik cAP ac and an RB960PGS. You can read the instructions on my wiki article Wireless networking with CAPsMAN and the MikroTik cAP ac.
On this post however, I will give a little detail on the decisions I made that don’t really fit into a step by step configuration guide.
But first…
A Little Trip to Backstory Land
If you aren’t up for reading the previous posts on this project here is a little backstory for you.
I have long been a fan of Ubiquiti wireless systems, especially Unifi, until recently. The first time I configured an Unifi network I was very pleased with the ease of installation and administration, the price of the hardware wasn’t that bad either.
As Ubiquiti evolved they made things more advanced, increased their product offering, and also increased their prices to the point where it’s not affordable for some smaller deployments.
Thus, I had the need to find an alternate solution and since I was using MikroTik routers already I dove into their CAPsMAN management platform and their small office cAP.
Now back to your regular programming…
Documenting a Simple Configuration
I will admit there are quite a few steps to setting up a network using CAPsMAN and most of the terminology used is not very intuitive. As I stated in a previous post the MikroTik documentation is very dry and it’s not always easy to follow, though I believe the words I used were “it sucks”.
There are a lot of other sites that had lots of screenshots from WinBox, things circled, and some vague descriptions of what is being done, and a few things were out of order. These were helpful and I thank anyone that takes the time to throw out some documentation on things like this, but they weren’t my cup of tea either.
The only option was to put my creative hat on and write out some documentation that I would like and would hopefully be useful to others. Please be sure to hop over to my wiki page Wireless networking with CAPsMAN and the MikroTik cAP ac and I do hope it helps you make sense of setting up CAPsMAN.
