Mesh is probably the wrong word. To set the scene I have a 2865 in my living room connected to a symmetrical gigabit connection. I have a garden home office (aka Garden Retreat ) at the end of the garden where WiFi doesn't reach. In between my Living Room and Garden is my Dining Room.

I've run a cat5e cable from my garden to inside my Dining Room but I cannot run it direct to the living room. I need a WiFi access point to plug the network cable into and then to bridge the last 5 meters to the 2865 via WiFi.

Living Room < WiFi> to Dining Room <cat5e> to Garden Retreat AP903 providing Wireless Services + ethernet to my Desktop.

So yes Mesh is the wrong word for sure. Extending my network to the Garden is a better description. This setup works great using my Apple Airports. Other than them being old, as I now have a vlans on the 2865 (trusted, untrusted and guest), I want to extend out to the Garden.

Well guess who just spend all evening trying to get a basic 1 node wireless mesh working and failed. I've never seen anything like it :shock:

• Enable Mesh on my 2865ac

• Power on a factory fresh 903 and scan for it on the 2865ac

• It finds it and adds it to the Mesh. It picks up the IP I bound to it and the 903 is online.

• Mesh status lists it as Amber with no config sync

• I push the Basic Config sync, no nothing happens. I repeat several times, nothing happens.

• Log into the 903 directly, manually the create the same SSIDs & security as the Mesh root

• 903 now drops offline. Comes back 60 seconds later for a few seconds. Drops offline again. Repeat.

Figured I did something wrong I factory reset the 903 and reset the Mesh on the 2865 (deleting the 903 from the 2865).

• Re-enabled the Mesh on the 2865ac

• Repeated adding the now factory reset 903 back to the Mesh, this was successful.

• Setup a ping to the 903 and left things for 10 mins to settle

• With the 903 still up after 10 mins I configured all the SSIDs as I did on the first attempt. This all completed successfully this time

• I notice that there was 10-15 seconds of packet loss for every 60 seconds of connectivity when pinging the 903 from an ethernet attached host to the 903

• I changed the 5Ghz channel from 42 to 36 and now the 903 starts its dropping offline for 60 seconds, back for 5 seconds, repeat again

Unless this is not how you're supposed to set them up, it just doesn't work! I haven't even got to the part that I bought them for which was to put the different SSIDs on dedicated vlans to isolate trusted/untrusted devices yet.

Bitterly disappointed. 2865 and 903 both on the latest firmware.

Am I doing something wrong or am I now just suffering like all the other threads on the board?

Unfortunately this is what I found and logged with Draytek under ticket #DQ746129.

I would suggest logging a ticket and referencing the above, but probably using something like the mesh 3-pack from BT or Deco M5 would be your best bet IMHO

Mesh status being shown as amber with no config sync was one of the problems I had with my 2927ac root - support were very helpful and sent me an RC firmware (now incorporated in 4.2.4 for the 2927) which cured that problem.

As suggested above, see if support can help before giving up !

I've spent 2hrs with 1st and 2nd line Draytek support today. They were able to see the issue but unable to fix.

We loaded on 4.3.1RC4 onto my 2865ac and added the 903 back as a Wireless node. Now it doesn't drop on/off the Mesh every 60 seconds....but its still not in a sync ready state so still unusable .

Incidentally we tried adding the 903 as a wired mesh node and this worked first time and went sync ready within 60 seconds. It just doesn't work as a Wireless node.

Support have taken the config of my 2865ac to reproduce in their labs for the next steps.

Edit: Was sent 4.3.1RC5 to install. Sadly, same problem

Been sent 4.3.1RC6 to install. Sadly, same problem