DHCP reserving on the router, also on the Wifi clone device?

[Steven P. Administrators]

In March I got a new router from my ISP and after a lot of faff I managed to get my wifi clone working again which is basically a TP-Link homeplug network.

 

The main TP-Link AP is wired to my router and the "extender" is plugged in upstairs and all it is supposed to do is clone my network with the Wifi clone option it has. Because of this I never even considered setting up DHCP reserve on the Wifi clone, however: recently a lot of my devices are getting 169.x.x.x addresses indicating there is a conflict somewhere, this just started happening a week ago, I haven't changed anything in that time.

 

My devices only started connecting to Wifi properly when I unplugged the extender upstairs.

 

So without having done any initial research into this problem I am wondering if I should also be cloning the DHCP reserve details on the extender? There's a full AP configuration page I can access on the extender to enable/disable 2.4GHz and 5Ghz and also setup the DHCP reserve. 

 

I have a lot of devices that use Wifi, so it is no small feat to setup reserve (17 wired and wifi reserved addresses in total).

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

The 169.x.x.x addresses would suggest these devices connected to your homeplug / access point are not finding a DHCP server on your network. Are the home plugs still connected to each other? 

Only one device should be doing DHCP on your network, so your DHCP reserve should only be setup on your router.

Anything else on your network such as a homeplug or wireless access point should just passive and only extending your network, not running DHCP.

 

I presume this WiFi clone option is to clone the SSID, shared key and encryption settings on your main router? If so can you just set this up manually on the access point / home plugs so everything is broadcasting the same SSID / shared key and encryption settings?

 

It might be easier for people to advise more if you could post a network diagram, showing the local static ip address of your router, home plugs / access points, along with screenshots of their configuration.

[Steven P. Administrators]

I managed to fix it, it seems somehow the Powerline network suddenly stopped working, so what I think happened is that the extender was broadcasting an identical SSID for 2.4 and 5GHz Wifi networks that was causing a conflict (maybe?) I can't really be sure, because the extender is upstairs and most of my equipment is downstairs. The printer "successfully" connected to my 2.4GHz wifi but still only got a 169 IP address when it should be in the 192.168.178.x range. 

 

I just ended up completely resetting the Powerline network and starting from scratch, and now it works:

 

 

You are right about DHCP reserve only being configured from the router, there isn't even an option to setup DHCP on the extender, so something else was clearly going on.

 

I wouldn't bother with it if it weren't for my Nest Protect upstairs which kept going offline without the extender network.