Wireless bridge now intermittent


 
M

Mark P.

New member
I have my Stoker set up through an Airport Express, which is sharing a WDS network (acting as a bridge) with my Airport Extreme (router).

I had no trouble, none, accessing my Stoker from either my network or from the internet until...

We got a Nintendo Wii. I added it to my home network, and noticed a few days later when I went to use the Stoker that my router had assigned a new ip address to my Stoker's Airport Express (it used to be 10.0.1.2, now it is 10.0.1.232). Ok, so I removed the Wii from my network permanently, and I changed the WDS settings in my router to use the new AE ip address (10.0.1.232).

Now I have a problem. I can access the Stoker from my network and the internet intermittently. One moment it's not connected, the next it's fine. I'm not 100% sure about this part yet, but it seems that after I reset the router, things are fine, then intermittent for a while, then it stops connecting to the Airport Express at all.

I'm stumped. Any ideas how to solve this? Obviously the settings are fine, otherwise it would not connect in the first place.

I'd really appreciate some help.

Mark
 
Your stoker's bridge is getting its IP address from the router by DHCP and it changed from 10.0.1.2 to .232? Usually the dhcp pool on routers is only about 100 addresses. As I recall the default on the airport that comes defaulted to 10.0.1.1 it was 10.0.1.2 - 10.0.1.100 I don't recall if they were assigned randomly or sequentially. Just something that struck me as odd that may be a clue. If you've increased your dhcp pool on the router and they're randomly assigned, probably nothing at all.

Anyway the first thing I'd do is setup static ip's by dhcp for the bridge and stoker. I believe apple calls them dhcp reservations. You'll need to get the MAC addresses (will look something like 00:2c:de:ad:be:ef) from the bridge and the stoker, then plug them into your router and set permanent ip's for them. Then you'll always know what the addresses of your devices will be.

I don't know if you can turn on the dhcp server on the bridge when its in bridge mode, but I'd double check and make sure the bridge airport isn't handing out addresese by dhcp too.
 
Hi John - thanks a lot for the suggestion. I understand what you are recommending, and I'll give it a whirl later tonight.

Thanks - Mark
 
So, I checked all my settings tonight. It turns out that when I learned that my router automatically handed out a new ip address to my Airport Express some time ago, I went in and changed it to manual back then. However, when I did that, I must have checked the box on the Airport Express setup to "allow wireless clients".

Had you not mentioned your last sentence about watching for the bridge being set to hand out addresses by dhcp, I cannot imagine that I would have noticed the checked box as being wrong or odd.

I stopped the bridge from allowing clients (handing out addresses), and have been running the Stoker inside for the past couple of hours and have not lost the connection once.

Looks like you solved my problem - thanks for such a thorough bit of sleuthing! I really appreciate it.

Mark
 
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