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Disable DHCP on XWN5001 power line wifi?
Hello, is it possible to disable DHCP on the HWN5001 router? I want to set this up as a simple access point and have the primary router handle IP addresses. I have heard that using the same SSID and ...
JamesGL wrote:Hi mattran,
The device is not a DHCP server. The router will handled assigning of IP address to every devices connected to the powerline.
JamesGL
Community Team
The XWN5001, if that is what we are talking about, is not a router either.
There should be no problem using the same SSID and password. I have done that, although it doesn't achieve much.
Take a pinch of salt with whatever you "have heard" until you have tried it yourself and come up against problems. As you already know something about the issues that people talk about, you should find it relatively painless to troubleshoot things if they go wrong.
Hi michaelkenward,
I informed the user that the XWN5001 is not a DHCP server and will not assign any IP address specially if the XWN5001 is connected to a router. The router will be the one handling DHCP to the devices connected the network.
JamesGL
Community Team
Thanks for the info. So, even if I used a different SSID on the Wifi on the powerline plug (which is what I have been doing now, after having tried the same SSID and feeling like there were conflicts between it and the main router in certain parts of the house), my devices would still get an IP address from the main router? For some reason I thought that owning the SSID also meant doling those out, but maybe not.
I will try setting back to the same SSID and see what kind of behavior I see in those parts of the house.
Thanks.
mattran wrote:my devices would still get an IP address from the main router?
Yes. This is also true if you use a wifi extender. All the devices talk to the router which does what its name suggests, routes the traffic around between the different addresses it allots. (That's why I pointed out that plugs are not routers.)
Using the same SSID can work just fine – one of my (non Netgear) modems insists on using the same SSID for both wifi bands – but you might then run into the issue with the devices that connect to it. If a device sees the same SSID coming from different sources, maybe it gets confused as to which to talk to. Will it pick up the one with the strongest signal? Or will it stay connected to the last one it talked to? Will it end up fighting itself?
I'd forget about the issue of who handles the traffic and look for advice on which strategy works best.
The fact that Netgear's devices hand out different SSIDs suggests that there may be a reason for this.
Here is a local KnowledgeBase piece that explains some of the issues:
How to set up my Wireless Extender to use the same SSID as my router | Answer | NETGEAR Support
This warns that one pitfall of using the same SSID is that:
it is possible that the wireless device may stay connected to the main router unless moving entirely out of its coverage area.Taken back to basics, why would you want the same SSID? Most wifi devices that I have used remember wifi access points they have talked to in the past. They will automatically connect to a wifi SSID they have seen before. So after the first connection the SSID becomes irrelevant.
I guess an important factor is if you are setting up a system that has lots of occasional visitors, or just a few regulars.
When I set up nearby wifi devices, I use different SSIDs, partly so that I know which one is working, but I assign the same password to them all. This makes it dead easy to reconnect if a device forgets one of the SSIDs.
There are plenty of general discussion out there on this issue:
Multiple AP's on the one SSID - Best Practice? | SmallNetBuilder Forums
What sense you make of them is down to you.