I seem to recall a feature in the way WiFi WAN can work with another Peplink router and I’m hoping someone here can recall the same and fill in the blanks for me.
The setup here is:
BR1 Pro A → WiFi WAN → BR1 Pro B → No internet
My recollection is that there is a mechanism in the Peplink router that doesn’t allow it to connect to another source if there is not an active internet connection on that source. In the setup above, the BR1 Pro B does not have internet connectivity and BR1 Pro A will not connect to it over WiFi WAN.
If BR1 Pro B is given an active WAN, BR1 pro A will connect.
In most cases this would be desirable, but for some deployments, it’s not. If anyone else can recall this, do you also recall if there’s a way to override it so that we can connect to the upstream router even without an internet connection? I’m almost certain there’s a forum post somewhere regarding this but can’t find it.
Hi Martin, Thanks for the reply. The turn off AP when there is no internet option is almost the opposite of what we’re after. I honestly don’t know why this model was chosen, but the idea is to keep the A router attached to the B router so that it can continue communicating with other connected clients of the B router.
set wifi wan health check to be ping to lan ip of the other router. if it can connect you will be able to access other router clients. set internet access default rule to be fastest response to stop internet traffic going out the wifi wan if the other router doesn’t have internet access.
I just tried this, but no luck. What we’re seeing is that if the upstream router doesn’t have an Internet connection, the downstream router’s WiFi WAN will never connect. It continues to report as scanning from the router dashboard, so I don’t expect outbound policy or the health checks to ever factor in or we’d see a connection and get an IP and then see failed health checks. We’ve tried setting the WiFi WAN to be independent of other WANs, turned health check off completely, and I feel like I’ve checked every possible help icon in hopes of a hidden setting, but nothing.
It’s disabled at the moment, but we’ve tired ping to the upstream router’s LAN IP as well. The WiFi WAN never reaches the status of “Checking connectivity” though. I don’t think WiFi WAN interface is reaching the point of running the health check even. The source WiFi router is sitting within 3 feet with antennas on and the pictured connection will be made if the upstream router is provided a WAN.
All seems a little bit odd to mee too, can another device like a phone or laptop connect successfully to the SSID you are using for the Wi-Fi WAN when the Peplink cannot?
Other odd thing to check, and again I don’t think that is the issue here but I notice on that screenshot your LAN IP is 192.168.51.1, I assume the LAN subnet or whatever subnet is serving the SSID that is used for Wi-Fi WAN is not the same / overlaps in any way, again I don’t think that would stop it associating and getting an IP but when you’ve tried everything else…
Thank you to everyone offering a thought here. I have some information from the Peplink team regarding this. The behavior is expected. The upstream or ‘main’ router beacon includes information on the router’s WAN status. If there is not a healthy WAN, then the client Peplink router will not connect.
A possible workaround for now is to create an unused VLAN on the main router and make a LAN port on the router an access port for that VLAN, then plug the WAN port into the LAN port. The router’s LAN DHCP server will provide it’s WAN with an IP. Disable the health check and modify outbound rules etc so traffic isn’t being passed over the WAN.
Now, connect the client router over WiFi WAN setting the health check to ping the main router’s LAN IP or another LAN host.
We will allow Wi-Fi WAN to stay connected or keep connecting to AP even if there’s no internet connection. This will be supported in 8.5.1 tentatively.
That’s great TK, nice to see that this is going to be configurable in the future.
I have a couple of points:
That “allow no internet connection” description is potentially confusing as people might get confused between that tick box and the option to disable health checks which could be perceived as doing the same thing?
Maybe this should be a hidden advanced setting that says “Ignore Peplink AP WAN status” or something like that?
Another approach might also be to allow us to decide on the AP side whether this information element is enabled in the AP beacon frames, disabling that would in theory allow the Wi-Fi WAN to behave just like it would if it was connecting to a non-Peplink AP that would not pass this kind of information to the client devices (I’d go as far as saying this should be available anyway, extra vendor specific IEs can cause strange client side issues at times, having a way to disable them is very helpful if we are getting down to really low level debugging).
