Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
@[email protected] My network switch arrived! I plugged it in and on the surface it’s working, but something is up with the internet.
I have a pi-hole on a raspberry pi, now connected directly to the ISP router as a troubleshooting step. I have two mesh APs, on directly to the router another to the switch. Have plugged cable from router into the first port of the switch. Plus a desktop and my home assistant Pi plugged into the switch.
For some reason, the internet is really spotty. Like full speed perfect then suddenly nothing. ISP router reports it has internet. Plus I seem to have a lot of trouble accessing the ISP router over the mesh network. Plus I have trouble connecting to the network from the ISP router.
My guess is maybe an issue allocating IP addresses? I’m not really sure how to troubleshoot this. It might not even be related to adding the switch, hard to say.
Any tips?
Edit: Actually I don’t think it’s the switch, I think the two mesh points are having trouble. I unplugged one and now it’s working… how do I troubleshoot that?
Interesting. A lot of the UniFi gear boots with its own static IP for management, usually in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. If that’s the same network as your router is providing IPs in then I wonder if it clashed with one of your APs IP addresses. They’d commonly just use DHCP to get one; and were already on the network so then you’d have two devices trying to listen on the same IP that could cause problems.
If its a DHCP conflict like that, the easiest way to fix it is to leave that AP unplugged until the DHCP lease on the router expires and gets cleared. But the challenge is you don’t know how long the lease is configured for and the AP might request the same IP when it boots again (because it will remember what it was); and as the router doesn’t know about anything with its own static IP configured it would just give it out.
I think that’s probably the most likely scenario off the top of my head; the switch won’t be doing any other L3 stuff, and if everything is back to normal with that 1 AP unplugged it sorta lines up.
I’m now almost certain it’s not the switch but the mesh points not being happy. They work over wifi, and have been using wifi up until I recently decided I wanted full speed and switched them to ethernet backbone. It worked fine for a while but broke when I moved things around to add the switch. Unplugging one was enough to restore the connection for everything else.
I will have to have more of a play to work out what went wrong.
It is the same range as my router is allocating. Do they not request an IP from the DHCP server (my router) which should avoid conflicts?
They should try DHCP first, but usually have an option to defer to the static as a fail safe for troubleshooting adopting the devices into the controller etc.
I think the switch is working fine. All quiet for the last 24 hours or so, with the mesh network using wifi only (slower speed because half is used for communicating between the two). I’ll need to find some instructions on how to use the ethernet backbone as plugging in and switching on in the app apparently isn’t enough.
Interesting, i’d have thought that would have been fine too; might have a read on how amplifi works myself - its a Ubiquiti product line i’d kinda forgotten existed.