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How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?

How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?

How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?
How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?
2025-04-13 22:00:34
Model: ER706W  
Hardware Version:
Firmware Version:

Hi All !

 

What happens is that I want to change my ER706W to act as an AP only since I have changed the internet facing router to something else, but since I really like the coverage of the ER706W and also I need an AP which can handle multiple SSIDs and VLANs, I decided to keep it and turn it to an AP. 

 

So the situation is that it's simply connected on one of it's lan port to the Router, WAN is not connected. 

 

1. I can 't disable WAN, ok fine solved it, I've changed it to Dynamic address, Disconnect that's it it's not trying to connect. 

 

2. When I have setup the LAN then I gave 192.168.3.2  and set DHCP disabled, and DHCP Relay set to 192.168.3.1  which is my main router's address. Fine, DHCP relay works, and everyting what if connected to Wifi is working well. 

 

But.

 

The ER706W itself is kind of lost. In the LAN setup you can't add a default GW, so it has no idea where to go if he needs to go out to Internet. 
And if I'm trying to add a static route to the routing table 0.0.0.0/0  MASK 0.0.0.0/0   192.168.3.1  it's says invalid parameters. (why ? )

Poor ER706W couldn't even reach the NTP server to sync time,  but when I have added a direct static route to the NTP server that's it's reachable through 192.168.3.1 voila it works and time synced.

 

What would be the proper solution here to turn it to a True AP mode ? 

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#1
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3 Reply
Re:How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?
2025-04-14 01:58:39

Hi @MonsterVic 

Thanks for posting in our business forum.

There is no way from us. Official. The thing is designed to be a router. You might see if others got an idea for this.

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Re:How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?
2025-04-14 17:30:16 - last edited 2025-04-14 17:32:57

  @MonsterVic 

 

this *might* work, but might be a bit hacky.  If it works for one, you can expand to cover other vlans

 

1 - Set up its WAN port with an IP on your network, and plug it in, let it treat it like a normal WAN, so it can gateway to your main router etc and you dont need any routes

2 - Set up a "dummy" LAN interface, give it random IP range totally not your main network.  no dhcp, just a lan IP that somehting radically different like 10.0.0.1

3 - Set the dummy LAN as untagged on all of its switching LAN ports

4 - Repeat step 2 for for as many vlans as you actually have, with different IPs for each.  all vlans should match your actual vlan tags form the main router

5 - for the tagged networks, set them as tagged on the LAN ports

6 - enable remote access so you can speak to it over its WAN port and not via LAN

7 - Gateway ACL ip_any > WAN OUT > ip_any DENY

 

As long as the SSIDs you set are configured to the same vlan tags per network, this....might work ?

 

Effectively you are letting the switch ports (which are handled by a seperate chip) still deal with the correct untagged/tagged frames which is all they care about, but because the "real" IPs dont match the "dummy" IPs the router part will just drop them and not route out to WAN.  the WiFi side of things should happily just insert and recieved the "real" tagged frames

 

i hope this makes sense

 

Main: ER8411 x1, SG3428X x1, SG3452 x1, SG2428LP x1, SG3210 x1, SG2218P x1, SG2008P x3, ES208G x1, EAP650 x6 Remote: ER7206 v2 x1, ER605 v2 x3, SG2008P x2, EAP650 x2, ES205G x1 Controller: OC300
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#3
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Re:How can you properly setup ER706W to act as AP only ?
2025-04-14 18:09:40

  @GRL 

 

Thx for the brainstorming. 

 

You idea seems to be really a bit hacky :) And honestly I'm not a fan of such solutions as it creates most likely unstability on the long run, or I will just forget 1 year later what the hell did I do here....

 

Most likely they way to go is to sell the ER706W and go for an EAP650 Wall and that's it :) 

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