macOS can't ping router, no internet access

[larryazlin]

New to OpenWrt, just installed 22.03.5 on a Netgear Nighthawk XR500. Initially everything seemed to go well. I followed the First Login instructions, enabled wifi, edited /etc/config/dhcp to give fixed IP addresses to most of my devices. I changed the netmask to 255.255.248.0. That's about all, IIRC.

Now to the problem: most of my Apple devices can connected to the router (called Disarli) wifi, but can't get to the internet. iPad fails, 4 different Macs fail, only iPhone works. However, I have multiple Raspberry Pi's (Debian) and they have no problem getting to the internet.

To further confuse things, none of the Macs (on wifi) can ping the router, however they all are getting assigned the correct IPv4 address by dnsmasq, as per the dhcp file. And they can ping OTHER hosts on the router! And they can be ping'd by other hosts, too. If I try and ping the router by name (OpenWrt) I get the correct IP address, but ping fails. If I use arping, it works! So, there seems to be something deeply and fundamentally wrong, but I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. Lots of googling hasn't turned up anything promising.

Also, this is a wifi specific issue. One Mac has a USB Ethernet adapter, and when connected to the router thru that, everything seems fine.

I'd like to use this as a learning opportunity, as much as just fixing the current issue.

Thanks
Larry

[mindwolf]

Did you assign a default gateway in OpenWRT? Also, did you actually want to have 2046 useable addresses?

[psherman]

let's see the configuration to understand what might be wrong...

Please connect to your OpenWrt device using ssh and copy the output of the following commands and post it here using the "Preformatted text </> " button:

Remember to redact passwords, MAC addresses and any public IP addresses you may have:

ubus call system board
cat /etc/config/network
cat /etc/config/wireless
cat /etc/config/dhcp
cat /etc/config/firewall

[larryazlin]

Thanks, mindwolf (and psherman). Your suggestion lead me to a solution, and to at least a partial understanding of what was wrong. Long story short, I had assigned static IP addresses to all of my Apple devices in the range 192.168.1.xxx (and set the router IP to 192.168.1.1) without noticing that the wan gateway IP, as given by DHCP on the modem, was 192.168.1.254/24. So the reason the Raspberry Pi's worked was because I'd given them static IP's in the range 192.168.2.xxx. OpenWrt must have been very confused! Once I moved my IP's outside of the wan range, all is well (at least as far as I can tell, at this moment). So, thanks again for the helpful and prompt response from both of you. Cheers!