I'm trying to configure a Meraki MR-12 (running v 19.7.10 as anything later has sever perf issues) as a WDS bridge to a Ubiquiti AP running it's commercial factory firmware, which is purported to support WDS.
(I need to have a bridge that is likely to work in a rental house, where I won't be able to touch the on-premise router)
I've followed the process outlined at Wireless network bridge (wireless repeater) to no avail. The MR-12 will associate to the Ubiquiti AP (without IP address), in "Client WDS" mode.
I have 2 interfaces:
LAN - set up as a bridge containing the wlan0 and eth0 ints. It's statically addressed within the IP space of the wireless network I'm attempting to bridge to. If I set it to DHCP it never get's an address
OPENWRT - which contains eth0 , does NOT have "bridge" checked, and is in the FW zone containing both LAN and WRT
I can get no connectivity to the wireless network, either from the MR12 itself, or wired clients connected to it's eth0 interface. I've ensured the OpenWRT DHCP server is ignoring those interfaces, disabled IPv6, and even disabled the FW altogether.
I've looked up several posts on this and nothing seems to stand out as an issue with my setup.
WDS is not standardized, the IEEE 802.11 standards don't provision multiple clients behind a STA (client) interface. As this feature is desired nevertheless, multiple proprietary implementations have been developed - which are not compatible with each other. The one implemented for the mainline kernel via the mac80211 stack is called 4addr, while it can be used by all mainline drivers (e.g. ath10k and mt76 can interoperate), it's not shared (legally and technically) with porprietary wireless drivers - so if you do want to use it, you must run OpenWrt (well, anything with mainline linux drivers) on both ends.
The alternatives would be switching both ends to another porprietary WDS implementation (same vendor, using their OEM firmware) or using relayd on OpenWrt (not recommended (quirky, buggy, no IPv6), but possible).
Yes. Specifically at a rented house I need a solid connection 150+ feet away in the back yard. If they have a wired ethernet jack avialable I'll run a cable from that. If not, backup plan is to park an OpenWRT router in the house as a bridge and run a cable from that.
Hence no control over the make/model/OS of the on-prem device...
