I have a 2862ac as Root and an AP903 and AP912C connected via Ethernet as Nodes. I cannot get the Nodes to stay online for more than a few hours before they disconnect and only then come back online with a reboot of them. According to their logs, they disconnect after failing to receive a KeepAlive response from the 2862 on Ethernet. Draytek Tech support have suggested using them as APs and enabling roaming after spending an hour logged in to the router/APs and not finding out the issue which seems a bit poor to me.

Does anyone else have a similar setup that is working stably?

So a few more observations. DLINK's old GO-SW-8G unmanaged switch doesn't correctly pass mesh packets - I had two of them, now replaced. (Dlink themselves refer to the issue) Mesh stays up a bit longer but then goes down as before.

I set the 2862 to mesh node (via CLI) and used the 912c as root. Mesh setup much smoother than using the 2862 and the two nodes stay connected now, but the 912c Root occasionally drops off, leaving the nodes connected. Its also a bit painful as it tends to reboot the 2862 when the Mesh is provisioned to it.

For now, I'll just use the 912c as Mesh Root and the 903 as Node, leaving the 2862 out of it. It feels very much like they rushed out the 2862 Mesh before their implementation was ready - hopefully the next firmware will work....

I abandoned my attempts to get mesh working on a similar configuration, way too unstable. Using the 1.3.4 firmware on two 1000c's and one 918R with 3.9.4.1 on a 2862. It would work for a while and then the mesh would collapse. It seemed more reliable and configured without issue if all passwords were "admin" (yes I updated the passwords in the External Devices section on the 2862) but I'm not leaving the passwords as default. Really poor to see how much effort was put into the marketing of this feature only for it to be (currently) useless.

It leads me to suspect that this was tested in an environment where all passwords were left at the default.

Has anyone else got this to work reliably?

I have a similar (presumably?) setup using a 2926ac as the mesh root (firmware 3.9.4.1). One of the 2926 LAN ports connects to a Zyxel switch, from which 3 x AP903s in "wired uplink node" mode are cable fed with POE from that, and a further AP903 connects as a wireless node to the AP903 mesh.

There are 3 VLANS and 3 wireless SSIDs, one using WPA2 / Radius server (the 2926) and two just plain WPA2.

My passwords are not the default.

My mesh is perfectly stable as far as I can tell.

Is that using the actual “Mesh” functionality or just physically wired APs?(AFAIK the current firmware editions don’t support VLANS on Mesh?)

Looks like the single VLAN is a 2862 limitation for now. Also I was using separate SSIDs for 2.4 and 5GHz, wondering if that could be it?