Routers & Other Networking Stuff

I could be biased but but Ubiquiti does home/small business routers the best, Edgerouters are full featured, powerful and cheap (can be had for 50 bucks)

ugh. okay someone please advise. i've been trying to figure this out for days with no luck...

so here's the setup. i have a wifi-extender as i'm currently staying with my folks for a bit in the poolhouse. they have wifi coming from their place and i have a netgear extender that reaches my place on the edge of their property. they previously had DSL because of reasons which resulted in about 500kb/s download speeds at best. i finally convinced them to upgrade which they did last week to 400/40mpbs.

okay, here's the problem. i setup my extender for the new network and have been getting disconnected every hour or so. it only lasts for a second or so, but it's enough to kick me off of any online game.

here's what i've figured out so far. it APPEARS to be the lease on the DHCP, as it's set for an hour and as soon as the lease is up, my net goes out and a new lease is set. at first i thought it was the new router from suddenlink, but my folk's computer is set for a 7 day lease. the netgear wifi extender i have doesn't have a way to set the dhcp lease as far as i can tell. also, when i setup the extender with the new network, i updated the firmware. i thought maybe it was just janky firmware so i reinstalled factory setting firmware and it's still giving me the same issue.

TLDR: HALP MY INTERNETS FROM DROPPING EVERY HOUR.

edit: oh, my wifi extender is a netgear EX6150v2 AC1200

Give devices perm/static IP? Wont that stop the DHCP renew?

Brahma said:

Give devices perm/static IP? Wont that stop the DHCP renew?

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Yeah you'd think... my pc is hardlined to the extender and it's still only lasting an hour. I don't have a Wi-Fi card for my pc

The extenders pull an IP from the Router don't they? So even if you're hard lined it's still renewing it's own lease on the IP every hour it sounds like.

Crone said:

The extenders pull an IP from the Router don't they? So even if you're hard lined it's still renewing it's own lease on the IP every hour it sounds like.

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Yeah, exactly. Is there a way to change how long the lease is for? There's no setting for it on netgear stuff

j00t said:

Yeah, exactly. Is there a way to change how long the lease is for? There's no setting for it on netgear stuff

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It'd be in your router settings. You said your dad's computer has 7 days but did you check the router settings?

the router in my parent's place sets up a 7 day lease. the wifi extender that i'm using has a lease renewal every hour. netgear stuff (the wifi extender brand) doesn't seem to have a lease renewal setting in the GUI.

it's just frustrating because it worked fine (albeit intolerably slowly) last week.

You shouldn't lose connectivity just because your lease expired. However, if you are running DHCP on both your router and your extender then that could cause some funky stuff. Settings static IPs certainly won't hurt - just make sure you adjust your DHCP pool to exclude those static IPs. By default I think netgear only uses like 100-199 anyway. So you could probably set a static in the range below that and be fine.

My honest suspicion though is that your router is changing it's wireless channel, which means the extender has to as well and it probably just isn't handling it all that gracefully. Try hard setting your router to whatever channel has the least congestion (plenty of phone apps that can tell you this) and see if that solves the problem.

that... sounds promising...

Edit: so i set the router to specific channels... the worst part about this is i have to wait an hour to see if what i did made any difference. so i'll post a response in an hour!

nope. still disconnected.

j00t said:

nope. still disconnected.

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uuuhhh... so my pc (hardwired to the extender) lost connection, but my phone didn't (wifi to the extender)

This sounds more like a power saving feature, you should look to see if your nic is set to auto power down or maybe your extender has a power saving feature.

Also if you are extending your wifi to the extender AC doesn't travel well through floors and wall, if you're just surfing might want to consider dropping to N.

loudgas said:

This sounds more like a power saving feature, you should look to see if your nic is set to auto power down or maybe your extender has a power saving feature.

Also if you are extending your wifi to the extender AC doesn't travel well through floors and wall, if you're just surfing might want to consider dropping to N.

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there's no power setting on my extender. the signal strength is fine. 2.4g is like 65%, 5g is about 40%. i don't care about 5g so much, but the extender picks it up without an issue.

did you check your nic?

it would be here...

NIC was set to allow the computer to turn it off to save power. i unchecked it. we'll see what happens.

well... that seems to have done it. thanks guys, i appreciate it so much

Edit: that absolutely was it. the lease is updating regularly before the hour is up (i think it's supposed to renew halfway through?) and there's no dc happening. thanks much

Koushirou said:

Moving to a new apartment and getting a new ISP and need a router. Don't need something super complex, just something that isn't going to shit the bed trying to go through walls in a 2BR apartment or from having ~10 wireless devices on it. Any suggestions on something not too pricey? Haven't had to use a router in a good few years, so dunno if a standard cisco router is fine or if there's a better option these days.

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Whatever your local walmart or best buy has will probably suffice. Not sure if Cisco is still branding their stuff as Linksys, but I have a 4 port 1G router with wifi. EA6350. Looks like Best Buy has em for $90. Mine hasn't had any problems in the past couple years. Just decide what features you want/need in terms of ports, bandwidth, and wifi bands, and go from there. Cheap shit is usually $30-50 range, moderate is $75-100, high end $150+.