MAC Filtering not passing through to AP?

[JWolf]

First big kudos to the developer of MerlinWRT. I have been on dd-wrt for a couple years with my RT-N66U's and didn't realize it was limiting bandwidth(along with pretty unstable wifi) until a recent speed upgrade and getting only half of the provisioned speed that seems to be a limitation of the dd-wrt builds. All of which has disappeared with moving to Merlin, but I digress.

I use wlan mac filtering on my primary router to my AP configured secondary router. With dd-wrt, I had to maintain the filter list only at the primary side and the AP would pick those rules up and apply them. I am finding that with Merlin(and presumably stock Asus firmware) that this same paradigm doesn't seem to apply, unless I'm missing/doing something wrong.

I verified this by removing the mac address from the primary router and leaving the mac filter setting default(off) on the AP side. This allowed wireless connections to the AP radios to have internet access. I then enabled mac filtering on the AP and added a bogus mac address for testing purposes. Only then did this prevent the device from being able to access the internet when connecting to the wireless radios on the AP. This is unfortunate overhead to have to maintain but acceptable given the stability and features that Merlin brings.

Am I missing something or is this just the way things work with Merlin?

 

[sfx2000]

Perhaps change the strategy - MAC filtering isn't very effective - the best approach is a strong and robust WPA2 password these days...

 

[ColinTaylor]

Am I missing something or is this just the way things work with Merlin?

Yes, that's just the way it works. There is no mechanism whereby the primary router "shares" the MAC list with the AP.

I'm surprised that's possible with DD-WRT. It's a neat trick.

Random thought: Maybe look at the AiMesh beta firmware. Perhaps that has something similar.
EDIT: Just realised you've got an N66U so the beta won't work for you.