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Forum Discussion
Strange issues with DHCP leases and machines registered as on my LAN in Orbi router?
(I believe my Orbi router is an RBK43 system, although the Netgear message forum isn't letting me select any modfel other than the RBK53.) But anyway, my issue is this: I've got a fairly good si...
kingtj wrote:(I believe my Orbi router is an RBK43 system, although the Netgear message forum isn't letting me select any modfel other than the RBK53.)
You are correct. The Netgear forum "product pull down" is woefully inadequate, a frequent source of frustration. Just a tiny clarification, RBK43 is the product name for a package containing one RBR40 router and two RBS20 satellites.
https://www.netgear.com/images/datasheet/orbi/RBK43.pdf
There have been several posts regarding Orbi DHCP behavior. For certain, Orbi checks that an IP address is in use when processing a DHCP address before checking the LAN IP Reservation table. This annoys me often when I have assigned an IP to a device and suddenly find that it has a different IP or that a different device now has the IP I assigned to that device.
One thing to check: Are the assigned IP's in a different number range from the general DHCP pool? It seems to be a reasonable practice to set aside a range of IP's for these devices, and set up the DHCP pool in a different range.
No. 70 devices are not too many. People have reported over 100, and the Orbi documentation mentions being able to handle a full DHCP subnet of 250 IP's (actually 249 because 250 is "special").
Thanks for all of the information! I hadn't realized before that the Orbi was unable to resolve local hostnames via DNS. That's definitely a really disappointing omission! That work-around is interesting but not sure I want to rely on that since it doesn't survive a router reboot.
It does sound like the best solution for me is to just go with static IP assignments for my server and its VM's, and to stop relying on the Orbi to "pin" those IP addresses via DHCP reservations. At one time, that's how I had things working and that worked just fine. (As others said, you just make sure the DHCP scope doesn't include the area where you put your static assignments.)
I believe the reason I went away from that was some difficulty with the FreeNAS virtual machines accepting static IPs, though? There's some additional complexity getting them to properly take the rest of their settings (default gateway, etc.) when they're configured with a manual IP assignment instead of just grabbing everything they need via DHCP. You wouldn't think that would be a big deal ... but between doing a network emulation and trying to support IPv6 as well as IPv4 and idiosyncracies of the FreeBSD operating system, I had some hassles.