I recently had Spark fibre installed. Because the ONT had to meet certain location requirements I ended up with my wifi at the other end of the house to where I needed it. Last night, with the help of a friend, I completed an inter-floor Cat-6 cable which has allowed me to move both the Huawei HG630b and my Apple Airport Extreme Base Station to where I want them. Since when I've had an odd issue with IP allocation.Previously: ONT -> patch lead -> HG630b -> patch lead -> Airport Extreme -> massive distance to devices (Macs)Now: ONT -> Cat-6 inter-floor -> HG630b -> patch lead -> Airport Extreme -> nice and close to devicesThe wifi is turned off on the HG630b.The Airport Extreme is set to bridge mode (no DHCP) and creates my wifi network.There is a second, older Airport Extreme (first of the 802.11n models) which is set to "extend wireless network"None of these devices were reconfigured while commissioning the inter-floor cable. Not that it probably matters, but a cable tester was used on the new cable and reported all OK. I also double checked both Airport devices were NOT running DHCP server function.So, the problem. Actually now I think about it this first occurred while we were sorting the cable out. My wife's Mac complained its assigned IP address (192.168.1.64) was duplicated on the network. I toggled the wifi off and on and a new address was assigned.When I was testing the cable, I plugged my MacBook Pro directly into the far end of the new cable, the near end being directly in an HG630b port. I got the same error, also with the .64 address. I had proved the cable was working so I ignored it and removed the cable. Since then my wife's Mac has multiple times made the same complaint. The .64 address is assigned elsewhere, it says.Tonight I started troubleshooting. A network sniffer tells me that the main Airport has the .64 address and nothing else looks amiss. I forced a lease renewal on the Mac and it got something like .78 allocated. All good. Except a while later - the Mac hadn't even been touched - it came up again with .64 in use! Wut!? Another lease renewal brought me back .64 again this time!The HG630b is configured to allocate .64 through .253 for DHCP, so I set a fixed address of .63 on the Mac and it could not see the Internet but could access the HG630b admin page. Don't understand that at all.Next thing I have done is taken .64 out of the DHCP range. I set the range start to .65 and then forced a lease renewal on the Airport and it picked up a new address fine.So far, the Mac seems to remain happy. But what on earth is going on here? The only thought that crosses my mind, but still wouldn't make sense to me, is whether the ONT has an IP itself and could this be also .64? Surely not.
↧