I want to put 4 Nanostation Ms at my house - 2 Nanostation M2s(north/south facing) and 2 Nanostation M5s (north/south facing). Each one is running 3.15.1.0. I would like to have them all connected to each other via Ethernet, so they can route amongst each other. I tried a few combinations of connecting the nodes' secondary ports together, both via a dumb switch and via a crossover cable. I tried the same two things on the primary ports. None of the 4 combinations seemed to do anything.
What should I try instead? I would like traffic coming into any of these 4 radios to be seen by users on the other three. I don't see any way to tweak vlan settings or similar in the web interface.
A good document for this is available on the Docs page "Device-to-Device Linking (DtDLink)"
The secondary port is only used on the XW NanoStation all others its on the primary.
These are all XW NanoStations, so I figured it would be the Secondary port that I should use
To my knowledge the NanoStation M2's do not come in an XW version.
Oh! Oh. Checked the matrix again. Yep, you're right. That explains why the M2 and M5 can't see each other.
So connecting the M2 (XM) and M5 (XW) nodes together... should all of the nodes have their primary ports on the same dumb switch? Would it make more sense to use one of the M5 or one of the M2 nodes as the only node with DHCP enabled?
This is where the document I mentioned comes in to show the normally recommended methods. Regarding the XW M5's if you only care about DTDLINK it makes no sense to plug in the primary port and the secondary port to the same unmanaged switch unless said device is intended to be your "master" device that will be the DHCP server (for reliability you will as shown on the doc probably only want one DHCP server enabled, however is you will never have devices locally they all can be enables but it may be random which one is master at a given time)
I don't really care which of the 4 nodes is master. I just want any remote clients seen by one of the 4 nodes be routable to any of the other 4 nodes.
I tried connecting one XW M5 and one XM M2 primary ports together via straightthru cables and a dumb switch. Neither node seems to see each other. I expected the nodes to show up on each other's Mesh Status page or under the OLSR Links or Routes pages. No change after several minutes and lots of activity light blinking on the LAN interfaces.
As noted before the XW use the secondary port for the DTDLink (due to hardware limitations) and the XM use the primary port
The connection in the setup of two devices as described would be M5 XW Secondary to M2 XM Primary. The same can be extrapolated out to 4 devices as well through a switch.
using four NanoStation M5's:
http://tim-yvonne.com/ham/mesh/array/index.htm
Works well. This allows others to use high gain dishes - pointed at my array - without the need for me to do any precision aiming at my end. Only those on the other end need to worry about the aiming aspect.
FYI, I initially sent this idea to Ubiquiti; they said to have vertical and horiz seperation between them, as well as wide channel spacing. They flat-out said it wouldn't work with any two on the same channel (in such close proximity to each other). I went with those RF shields.
But like others have stated, the pass-through function (from Main to secondary port) is disabled on XM units once Mesh flashed.