Newly reset openwrt router, problems accessing web

[lleachii]

@jordanthompson

Which confuses me a bit... I assumed that the (no longer) bad router is creating its own subnet that shouldn't get nat'ed because it is in the 192.168.X.X group...

• "Creating"???
• Is this a technical term?
• Can you better describe, are you referring to DHCP?

@jordanthompson

Can you please explain why this is not the case?

• You have an issue on Layer 2 of the OSI model at any point you address 2 devices, with the same IPv4 address, on the same Broadcast Domain.
• You have a Layer 3 issue if you address 2 identical network ranges on different sides of a router (i.e. LAN and WAN).

From your descriptions, you seem to be having issues in the former (primarily) and the latter.

Address Resolution Protocol

[Hegabo]

@jordanthompson

bad router is creating its own subnet that shouldn't get nat'ed because it is in the 192.168.X.X group

Just to further simplify the concept:

A router (when it's in router mode) will do NAT, separating the outside (WAN) form the inside (LAN), so devices in the outside should be on one subnet and devices on the inside should be on a different subnet.

The router doesn't create the subnet. It just translates the addresses between WAN and LAN. The switch (let that be a separate device or part of the same physical device that includes the router) connects the connects the devices together. The devices "make" the subnet, whether their IPs are manually set or automatically given by a DHCP server (which can be on the same physical device of the router, or can be a separate device).

You seem to mistakenly assume that 192.168.x.x is a group (or subnet). If it was, you would still have issues, because it would mean that both WAN and LAN interfaces of your "bad" router are on the same subnet, which is incorrect, as @lleachii explained.

IPs starting with 192 are class C IPs, which means that the most significant 24 bits specify the network ID, for example 192.168.1.x for your main router LAN side (and all deices connected to it, including the bad router's WAN side), and 192.168.10.x for the bad router's LAN side. So 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.10.1 are on different networks.

If you were to connect both routers LAN to LAN, then you would have to make the bad router's LAN IP in the same network as the main router's LAN by giving it IP 192.168.1.10 for example.

Having mentioned that IPs starting with 192 are class C IPs, that's the usual but you can always adjust the subnet mask from 255.255.255.0 for class C IPs to a different one to better suite the number of networks and devices you have.