The folowing procedure illustrates how a mesh AP boots:
- The future mesh AP starts booting (it only requires a PoE injector).
- The first thing it does is look into its boot-configuration and see if mesh is enabled.
- If mesh is enabled, it looks at the configured mesh SSID.
- At this point, the future mesh AP behaves as a Wi-Fi client (imagine it is a laptop associating to an AP).
- it starts to look for an AP that is advertising the SSID; if it finds several APs, it chooses the one with the best signal (with show ap mesh-links, for an already active mesh AP, you can identify what candidate portal APs it has found and how it sees their RSSIs)
- It goes through all the steps that a normal client goes through of association, authentication, authorization, active, and so on.
- It uses the mesh psk phrase that is configured in its boot-configuration.
- When it is active as a client (and seen in show sessions mesh-ap), only now it starts to behave like an AP, which means that it starts to send find-mx packets to find its controller, establish a communication with it, and boot on it.
- What is configured on the radios of the mesh AP has no implications at all in the mesh link; what is configured on the radios of the mesh AP matters, when you want to connect Wi-Fi clients to the mesh AP.
Note:
- To disable the radios of the mesh AP, the mesh link will be established without any issues, if the correct information is configured in its boot-configuration.
- If the radio of the portal AP is disabled, the mesh APs will start looking for a portal again, associate to it, and boot (with the above procedure).
2020-10-10: Archived article.