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Forum Discussion
EX2700 N300 Can't connect to Internet
I've been through the setup of my EX2700 N300 several times after factory resets. Each time the "genie" pops up and I go through the steps to connect to my WiFi and it assignes the _EXT name to it th...
I've already got two other extenders which have been and are right now working, so the issue shaould not be the network system. This N300 connected okay (although manually) and will not connect to the internet.
I bought one of these to extend my Wi-Fi into the garden. It works for a while and then really cocks up my network. It's slaved to my main Virgin Media router fine and appears as MyNetwork_EXT. Devices can connect to it and get to the internet find.
Then after a while (like days), all Wi-Fi devices are connected to Wi-Fi but report they can't get to the internet. The reason - they have been given an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range. My normal network is 196.168.0.x. Turn the Netgear EX2700 off, reconnect to Wi-Fi on a device and it starts working.
What's happening is that the EX2700 N300 is turning on it's own internal DHCP server on a different subnet. A real no-no on the same physical network segment! You can't have two DHCP servers on different subnets on the same segment... I'm assuming that the reason it's doing this is that it's not been able to renew it's own DHCP connection from the normal DHCP server - a Windows server in my case but usually the main ISP Wi-Fi router - so switches on it's own subnet which is what one might use after a factory reset.
DHCP is sort of a shout and first reply kind of protocol. So (say) my phone shouts on the network "give me an IP address". The first DHCP server to respond is used. So the N300 is getting in there sometimes before the Windows DHCP servers.
I'm unable to work out why it's doing this. The green router light it always on showing it's connected a routed connection to the Wi-Fi router. I've just given the N300 a static IP address to see if that helps.
Hello robnicholson
The ex2700 shouldnt be able to assign its own DHCP as that is all handled by the router that it is connected to. Do you happen to have a modem/router and a router connected to it?
DarrenM
Indeed, I'm well aware of that. No - it's connected via Wi-Fi to the main ISP router. It's a very bizarre incident. Yes, the extender is designed to fall back to 192.168.1.250 (from memory) if it's unable to find a DHCP server on the network. I suspect that it does have it's own DHCP server inside which it automatically enables in this situation. It makes a bit of sense when you're setting it up and you don't have WPS - you have to connect to the extender using it's own default Wi-Fi network and the easiest way to help users here is to use supply an IP address from it's own DHCP server.
The fault is that sometimes the device seems to fall off the network and into the above state when it's bridged to the main router thus enabling two DHCP on different subnets on the same segment. Bang! The question is why is this happening when the DHCP server on the main network is fine - it's running 24/7 on a Windows server.
Since giving it a fixed IP address, it's been fine.
