Trying to setup a PtP wifi link between two LANs

docwho76

Myself and a neighbor are trying to setup a point to point wifi link between our two LAN's to allow ourselves to easily access each others Plex Media Servers and other network assets without having to go out via our WAN uplinks(constrained bandwidth). To do the PtP bridge we got two of the new Ubiquity Nanobeam M5-16 units which support being setup as either a transparent L2 bridgehttp://wiki.ubnt.com/BeansTalk_PtP_Layer-2_Bridge_Direct or as a L3 router.

Currently I am trying to bench test this setup before installing the hardware(the hard part, or so I thought) and have the following setup:

Internet–>[(WAN) pfsense 2.1.5 (LAN)]–->L2 Switch--->NanoBeam M5-16 #1--->wifi link--->NanoBeam M5-16 #2--->Macbook Pro(wifi turned off, Ethernet only)

which I thought would be good enough to do some basic network bench testing, but I am running into routing issues and am not sure what my problem is. I have attached a diagram of what the two networks should look like and how they are behaving. If anyone has some advice here that would be awesome, thanks!

home-to-home-wifi-ptp.png_thumb

Derelict

First question: Why are you natting over the ubiquitis?

I, personally, would not be comfortable with a setup like that. I would want a firewall interface on which I could allow pass traffic to select destinations and deny everything else from the other site.

I'd make OPT1, give it an IP address on 10.0.0.0/24 and bridge the ubiquitis. The only static route necessary would be on the other router telling it to route 192.168.1.0/24 to your OPT1 address.

With that you can control everything that ingresses your network.

Derelict

I might be tempted to do something like this…

Instead of the complexity of the management VLAN you could also make OPT1 a larger network and give the ubiquitis an address on it.

![Ubiquiti Bridges.png](/public/imported_attachments/1/Ubiquiti Bridges.png)
![Ubiquiti Bridges.png_thumb](/public/imported_attachments/1/Ubiquiti Bridges.png_thumb)

docwho76

Yeah, after dicking about in the BusyBox on the ubiquities and scratching my head over the routing nonsense I think I'm going to go with the approach you laid out. Its waaaaay simpler. Its just a little annoying since I've got the VLAN my LAN side port to make that happen. I'm planning to upgrade to a pfsense box with more than 3 physical NICs and when I do that I can just wire it up direct then.