Hey everyone,

So I am currently scheming replacing my three aging Unifi UAP-AC-LR units with a Mikrotik setup.

I liked Unifi when they were a young company, but they seem to have been sliding downhill, and it is time for a change. Honestly I don't want to be anywhere near their cloud services, and that seems to be the way all of their offerings are going.

With my Unifi setup, I have three WAP's, all of which are configured with VLAN's isolating the individual SSID's, and with trunks on the switches to bring all of the VLAN's upstream.

The local Unifi controller server runs in an LXC container on my server and is used to manage all of the WAP's.

My intent is to replace the UAP-AC-LR units with Mikrotik cAP ax devices. I know anyone of them could serve as a CAPsMAN server, but I have become really fond of having a dedicated server with which to manage the WAP's virtualized on my server.

So, in my setup, I'd replace each of the Unifi units with cAP ax units, and then shut down the Unifi Controller Linux container, and replace it with a CHR virtual machine using KVM.

So, that was a really long introduction to get to where I ask my question, which is, which version of CHR would I need for this setup.

I read in the CAPsMAN manual, that you can configure it in CAPsMAN forwarding mode, that sends all of the traffic from the WAP to the CAPsMAN server, where it is decoded and forwarded on. This seems somewhat inefficient. My intent - instead - is to just use the VLAN's I have already set up.

So my questions are:

1.) If I use CAPsMAN in VLAN mode, will packets still be sent to the main CAPsMAN server, or will they be routed directly from the WAP using the assigned VLAN?

2.) If the use the VLAN's directly, I presume the CAPsMAN server will se rather light traffic, only being used during provisioning and collecting of troubleshooting data, and the like. Is this accurate? If so, I could probably just assign CHR a single Ethernet device with all the needed VLAN's and maybe even use the free 1mbit/s version.

Do my assumptions above sound about right?

While I'm sure I can figure it all out when I have the hardware in my hands, I'd rather not waste time setting up things if they won't work the way I intend them to.

I appreciate any comments or thoughts.

1- Cap AX means capsman for wifiwave2 (or wifi since 7.13beta).
In that version there is no capsman forwarding, it used to be in capsman for legacy wifi.

HOWEVER ... if you use VLAN setup with complete different base vlan (= pvid <>1), most likely your caps device might not be able to detect capsman controller UNLESS you also add a VLAN interface to bridge with the correct pvid and set caps to detect controller on that same VLAN interface.
No VLAN filtering needed.
Just a heads up. Default config alone is not enough in that case.

2- yes. The controller will only do the controlling. Traffic will be handled by caps and router.