Help setting up APs with a Router + separate DNS and DHCP server

R

RoachForLife

n00b
Joined
Oct 8, 2004
Messages
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Hi gang, so a bit ago I put my old ass routers on my network to get some range close to the cement walls. All was good, hooked my wifi bulbs to them etc. I used some guides to connect my DDWRT old routers and set as APs. Just today I was working on doing static IPs for all of my wifi devices, ran into an issue that my TP Link router, in their infinite wisdom, chose to limit the amount of static IPs to 64. Anyhow I was already using Pihole on a Rasberry Pi and saw it had a DHCP server, so I switched it over and generally working well, except these side APs.

So basically I have my TP Link Router, then the Raspberry Pi which does DNS and DHCP.

I went into the AP for for both Gateway and Local DNS I changed the values to point to the Rasberry Pi itself thinking that would fix the problem. Oddly enough some of the bulbs work, as do the items on Ethernet to them (I have 1 device on ethernet), but some do not. When I try to connect over wifi with my phone it tries to connect but then reverts back to my other TP Link wifi. My best guess is it doesnt know what to do with my IP perhaps? Maybe that is working right I really dont know. It will sometimes say the wifi password is wrong even though I double and triple checked it. Also worth noting its set to WPA2 Personal, with AES. Again, all just very odd, if anyone has any thoughts on what to do here I would be interested. Thanks
 
Check phone to make sure it doesn't use wifi selection based on signal strength, and that it can roam ap to ap.

Also roaming and hand off generally can be a pain without signal mapping et al

All the routers as APs are in AP mode right? No double NAT here I hope?

Did you turn off the old DHCP, reset things to get new leases from pihole?
 
Yes dhcp was turned off on router and on via pihole dhcp. It was working fine except some settings on my ddwrt it doesn't seem to like. I did a test and out dhcp back to my router and the ddwrt APs connect just fine. So I suppose something about the way pihole dhcp (uses dnsmasq I believe) is not allowing it to authenticate /register for some reason. I can review my settings and post them here but from what I recall I did the following

Set to ap mode
Static ip
Gateway and dns were set to my router. As mentioned on first post I changed to pihole ip but still same issue
Turned off dnsmasq on ddwrt
Turned off routing option
Set up wifi with wpa2 personal aes
Disabled firewall on ddwrt.

Probably a few other settings but I followed the guides out there. The fact it jives with my router dhcp and not pihole dhcp tells me it's the ddwrt settings or pihole settings. For pihole outside of setting the static IPs not much else I can change really. Anyhow appreciate the help
 
Hmmm...what is your subnet mask on the TPLink and Pihole? Something tells me this is a tcpip config issue...
 
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