Cannot get IP addresses on LAN interface

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

HI there,

Total Noob to LEDE I'm afraid, so apologies if this is a dumb question!

I bought a BT HomeHub 5 running LEDE Reboot 17.01.4 r3560-79f57e422d with LuCI from ebay a few days back to replace the terrible Vodafone Connect that was sent by my ISP. I have been surfing these forums and learning a lot since then but unfortunately I haven't been able to find an answer to my problem (maybe I am just not wording it correctly!).

My home network is:
LEDE router connected directly to BT openreach socket.
Normally 6-8 devices connected via wifi including laptop, phones and 2 chromecasts
1 Homeplug connected to router LAN socket
3 other Homeplugs connected through the house, including 1 connected to an Xbox One and another with a wifi device providing a second network upstairs.

The WAN interface, I've used different DNS servers than the ISPs ones, but left everything else as default, and that seems to be working fine.

On the LAN side of things I am having problems getting all of my devices to connect. They might be the same probelm or they might be different, so hopefully one of your Pros will be able to advise on that!

  1. Some devices are able to connect via wifi (laptop and 1 phone), but others can't obtain an IP address. After lots of googling and forum searching I now understand that IP address allocation are the job of the DHCP server, but I haven't found any posts that suggest that my network should need anything other than the default DHCP settings. Sometimes all of the devices can connect and work fine, but then a few hours later none of them can, without me having changed any settings.

  2. It doesn't seem to be working at all with the homeplug part of the network. Nothing that is connected to any of the remote homeplugs can get any connection, whether on wifi or ethernet.

I have taken a few screenshots (below) of the LAN interface screens (including all of the different tabs on there), but please let me know if you need to know anything i haven't captured here. Any suggestions or pointers to the correct search terms i should be using would be greatly appreciated!

All the best,
Moley159
1

2

Maybe start fresh with a sysupgrade without keeping any settings, since you purchased preinstalled.

Also check none of your connected devices are using a random MAC address. You could easily run out of assigned IP addresses from dhcp. Check the LUCI status overview page to see how many are currently assigned.

Then check on the LUCI network-> interfaces-> Lan the total DHCP address is sufficient ( limit - start) needs to be more than the number of devices that will connect during a typical leasetime. For example if you have sixty devices Max during the day you could set start = 100 , limit = 199 and lease time 12h.
Or for example if you had a Max of 30 at any one hour but many devices during the day you could set start = 100 , limit = 199 but lease time to 1h so the assigned addressee are recycled more frequently.

Then for devices that are always connected like the Xbox you can go to the luci -> network-> dhcp & DNS page and assign a static lease , the address can be outside the range above if preferred such as 192.168.1.201

3

Thanks! I'll give that a go and report back.

4

It may be helpful to check your device system log (Luci > Status > System Log) and posting it here (removing your DSL connection details if needed). It may contain the reason for wireless devices to get deauthenticated.

If your wireless clients are deauthed due to a "system request", your LEDE device may be out of entropy left. I would suggest installing and enabling the service "haveged" to help with it.

5

Make sure the IPv6 DHCP server is turned off. This is in the tab at the bottom of the LAN settings page. Make sure the other router / dumb AP upstairs is not running a DHCP server.

There is a new release 18.06 which you should upgrade to eventually. Though the 17.01.4 should be working on that device as well.