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Forum Discussion
Working but unmanageable WAC104 Wireless Access Point
I have a WAC104 running very happily on our home network. Devices happily connect to it. The only problem is that I can't connect to the WAP itself, for example to update the firmware. The router...
richard-york wrote:
I have a WAC104 running very happily on our home network.
You have posted your message in the section of this community given over to General WiFi Routers (Non-Nighthawk). (This is easily done, given Netgear's complicated community structure.)
Many questions apply to different types of device, so there may be useful responses here, but you might get more help, and find earlier questions and answers specific to your device, in the appropriate section for your hardware. Going by earlier discussion of this device, that's probably here:
Business Wireless - NETGEAR Communities
I will ask the Netgear moderator to move your message.
In the meantime you could visit the support pages:
Support | NETGEAR
Feed in your model number and check the documentation for your hardware. Look at the label on the device for the model number.
You may have done this already. I can't tell from your message.
I mention it because Netgear stopped supplying printed manuals and CD versions some years ago and people sometimes miss the downloads.
Thanks Michael, hopefully someone will be able to reply.
I've tried some more experiments and something that helps is forcing the R6220 router to assign a specific IP address to the MAC of the access point in the "LAN Setup" page. All of a sudden it then pops up on the connected items list and I can then connect to it with that address.
My guess then is that there's a bug in the netgear router software that stops it showing netgear access points from showing up in the "attached devices" list unless the IP address has been locked in in the "LAN Setup" area. It was always there but short of sequentially going through the IP addresses until I happened to hit on it I couldn't find it. I've never been able to get the www.aplogin.net method to work.
What makes things even more tricky is that the WAC104 has a 192.168.0 default address, but the R6220 works on 192.168.1. Getting it up and running is just horrible then, becuase to talk to it I had to jump through hoops to assign a static IP address on my Mac, connect and configure the AP and then write down the MAC address (I couldn't find it on the AP itself).
All just a bit more work than it should have been. It doesn't seem unreasonable for a netgear router and a netgear AP to play well together!
The aplogin.net /.com appears to work on a non-configured / uncustomized WAC104 only - but no longer once it's set-up. Also keep in mind this aplogin.net/.com URLs can only work if connected to the WAC104 - not to the router wired or wireless network.
The WAC104 does (since around 2017 says the fine manual - needless to say this might require newer firmware) have a DHCP client by default, so it will be able to get an IP address from the router DHCP server.
We've seen that devices not communicating with the router and the Internet (IP wise) disappear from the connected devices - this is an oddity of some Netgear router implementation. Disconnecting the WAC104 from the router, power-off, connect the network cable again, and power-up should bring back the
The worst case scenario is that one has to reconfigure a computer LAN or WiFi adapter to the 192.168.0.x/24 (255.255.255.0) network so the WAC104 default IP address of the device can be reached on the 192.168.0.100 default IP following a factory reset, and in the absence of a DHCP server (or very old firmware on the WAC104).
I admit: It's not the most user friendly wireless access point on earth, especially not for hard-core networking people. Unfortunatley, Netgear does not have spent enough effort to change this unlucky design.
Thanks for the reply, what you say makes a lot of sense. It was actually the firmware updates that set this off becuase, unlike the R6220 router, the WAC104 can't keep itself up to date automatically. This means that even though it was sitting happily on the network doing its job it was unmaintained and getting progressively more and more out of date.
Let's hope Netgear are reading this and learn from it, particularly the problem of devices disappearing from the connected devices list. That made an awkward problem much worse. If they can add auto updates of WAC104 firmware (or just the ability to check if it's up to date or not) that would be even better, though unlikely!
- Richard.
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