RUTM10 Hotspot does not work

NETWORKING SOLUTIONS
1

Hello
I’m trying to configure a hotspot on a RUTM10. The router shall be installed on a sailing yacht and supply one VLAN for the boat and captain stuff (navigation, autopilot, radio, satellite,…) and another VLAN for crew and guests.
Both VLANS have a WLAN connected to it, which shall be protected by a hotspot captive portal to access the internet (starlink) - so clients don’t have a permanent internet connection.

I probably have tried any different combination of configuring the hotspot and don’t get it to work.

What works

  • Clients can connect to the hotspot and get the hotspot IP address
  • authentication as user (username and password) on the captive portal works flawless
  • connecting to the routers IP address also works

What doesn’t work

  • connection to the internet is not possible

Tracing it down with tcpdump I found out that DNS requests from the clients are blocked. So I allowed all INPUT, OUTPUT and FORWARD chains on all zones.
Tried also different DNS servers (local, Google, Cloudflare) but non of them are answered. Requests can be seen on the WLAN interface (wlan1-2,…) but are not processed to the WAN interface. Even with all firewall rules fully open.

I have reseted the router infinite times and made different configurations (without VLANs, only one WLAN, configuring a hotspot just out of factory reset) nothing worked and it was always the same issue: clients can connect, get an IP address but are unable to connect to the internet as packages are not processed to the WAN interface.

Does anybody have the same experiance with the hotspot feature and may found a solution?

Many thanks!

2

Hi, does the internet work without hotspot in the exact same setup? What firmware version do you have installed?

3

Yes sure :grinning_face:

FW is the latest: 7.13.3

4

It’s very weird if you actually get the captive portal page because you need internet connection for DNS requests to be resolved to actually see that page.

Are you saying it doesn’t work even if you factory reset the device and just create Hotspot instance on WLAN, enable it and don’t touch any other setting?

Regarding VLANs, setup that works for me (although on RUTX, but should be the same):

  • Create port based untagged VLAN.
  • Create new LAN interface with protocol None, select created physical VLAN interface, bridge the interface.
  • Create Hotspot on the created LAN interface.
  • Assign the LAN interface to WLAN.
5

:sunny:
It works now! The trick was the LAN interface with protocol none. I never thought about that, even if I found it strange to propagate two ip address - one for the LAN and one for the hotspot…

Many thanks for your support and advice!

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6

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