I wanted to pass along something I troubleshooted and was able to solve with some googling.
The NanoStation M5 XW doesn't support VLAN1 or VLAN2 on the Main port. Only the untagged "LAN" is supported on the Main port. In order to use VLAN1 for "WAN" or VLAN2 for "DtDLink" you must connect it to the Secondary port and have a VLAN-enabled switch with either (or both) of those VLANs tagged at the switch (nothing native will work, so depending on the switch it can be configured for no native VLAN or an unused VLAN).
Specifically, my configuration was on an HP Switch:
Ports 1-4 - unrelated non-Mesh devices
Port 5 - VLAN10 (native, untagged) - Laptop Mesh client
Port 6 - VLAN1 (tagged); VLAN2 (tagged); Packet type: Tagged Only; PVID: None - NSM5 Secondary Port
Port 7 - VLAN10 (native, untagged) - NSM5 Main Port
Port 8 - VLAN1 (native, untagged) - Internet router
Note, the NSM5 XW has an internal switch unlike the other NSMx devices, which have 2 physical ports off the cpu. What this translates to is good and bad...
The good, it's the only XW hardware that is working in the openwrt community of users right now (probably due to this switch).
The bad, well not so bad, just a little twist. The switch also has issues in that it can't do dual vlan tags and untagged packets on the same port.
Consequently, be sure to use the ports configured for the following function only:
main: LAN devices
secondary: DtDlink or WAN (still may require 802.1q switch, won't work if connected to most home networks)
This means you can co-locate the device at a station dtdlink'd to another node-band, plug in an ipCam/lan device, and you don't need an external network hub. Joe AE6XE
All the nanostations 'back-feed' POE power from the secondary port thought to and out the main port. it works, but keep in mind was not designed this way. I know people cutting down on cat5 counts up the pole exploiting this and have not heard of anyone smoking a device to date. The risk of smoking something is possible, but unknown. Any noise or other filters on the POE feed into the secondary port are also likely to be nonexistent. There are posts in the UBNT forums of how people figured out this worked--they smoked the main port, seemed to be a defect on ubnt's part involved, and couldn't power up the node, so they started using the secondary port to feed in the power.
For the security surveillance stations we've put up, sometimes used 3 x cat5 cables to feed up power. This seemed to be a good fit when the location had 110vac power, so all the bricks were on a power strip with individual cat5s going up the pole. Other times, and sometimes depended on parts available, we used one cat5 up the pole to the station for power, then split out the power to all the devices in a junction box. This seemed more common for the 12v battery station sites. No-doubt this pushed the max power one can do on a cat5 POE, but it works. With relay node stations we had 2 x mesh nodes, 1 x ipCam, a GS105E hub--thus 4 devices to power. We crossed channels or bands to daisy chain mesh nodes and ipCam video streams back to the command center. We can easily do 4 HD video streams over links setup this way (no contention for RF channel in the design).
I wanted to pass along something I troubleshooted and was able to solve with some googling.
The NanoStation M5 XW doesn't support VLAN1 or VLAN2 on the Main port. Only the untagged "LAN" is supported on the Main port. In order to use VLAN1 for "WAN" or VLAN2 for "DtDLink" you must connect it to the Secondary port and have a VLAN-enabled switch with either (or both) of those VLANs tagged at the switch (nothing native will work, so depending on the switch it can be configured for no native VLAN or an unused VLAN).
Specifically, my configuration was on an HP Switch:
Ports 1-4 - unrelated non-Mesh devices
Port 5 - VLAN10 (native, untagged) - Laptop Mesh client
Port 6 - VLAN1 (tagged); VLAN2 (tagged); Packet type: Tagged Only; PVID: None - NSM5 Secondary Port
Port 7 - VLAN10 (native, untagged) - NSM5 Main Port
Port 8 - VLAN1 (native, untagged) - Internet router
The Google hit which helped me with this was: http://www.broadband-hamnet.org/hsmm-mesh-forums/view-postlist/forum-1573/topic-1573-eta-of-xw-platform-firmware-for-ns-m5.html
Beginning to ponder how to best provision Surveillance Video for County Fairs & other similar circumstances.
If the XW NSM5s do provide POE through the second 'switched' port this could be immensely useful.
TIA, 73
...dan wl7coo
For the security surveillance stations we've put up, sometimes used 3 x cat5 cables to feed up power. This seemed to be a good fit when the location had 110vac power, so all the bricks were on a power strip with individual cat5s going up the pole. Other times, and sometimes depended on parts available, we used one cat5 up the pole to the station for power, then split out the power to all the devices in a junction box. This seemed more common for the 12v battery station sites. No-doubt this pushed the max power one can do on a cat5 POE, but it works. With relay node stations we had 2 x mesh nodes, 1 x ipCam, a GS105E hub--thus 4 devices to power. We crossed channels or bands to daisy chain mesh nodes and ipCam video streams back to the command center. We can easily do 4 HD video streams over links setup this way (no contention for RF channel in the design).
Joe AE6XE