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Forum Discussion
EX7700 Virtual MAC Disappearing
Hi everyone. I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure this out and I'm hoping someone from Netgear and the community can help out. I bought an EX7700 to act as a wireless bridge for my Ethernet devi...
What actual firmware are you on?
Did this just start recently or has it been doing it the whole time?
The EX7700 is a triband and so can use either the higher band 5ghz or lower band for the backhaul. Have you tried changing which one you use? (you'd change it on the router and the ex7700 would have to reconnect.)
- I'm currently using 1.0.0.210. I tried 206 about a week ago but only my windows desktop had it's virtual MAC. Extender saw other devices, although it just labeled it as unknown, but no virtual MAC assigned.
I believe it's always been happening. Usually I access my Samba server from my PC which is on the same switch. A VPN server, another Windows PC and test server 1 & 2 is on that switch as well. I first started noticing the issue once I finished configuring my Samba shares and VPN server but I couldn't access it from devices not on the switch.
I checked the settings but I don't see any options for configuring the backhaul on the router or extender. Unless you mean I should connect the extender to the router via 5ghz which is already the case. I have the router and extender connected via both 2.5 and 5 GHz.So during setup of the extender, disable the "extend 2.4ghs signal" option. it uses this as a backup for the 5ghz backhaul. But 2.4ghz is slow and sensitive to interference. If the extender is to far away and sometimes defaulting back to that, it can cause issues.
To change which 5ghz channel it uses, you change it on your primary router. The EX7700 can use either the low band or the high band channels for backhaul and it uses the other for front haul.
So if your router is on channel 36, change it to the higher 149+ channels. Or vice versa.
you might have to re-setup the extender. Again, during the setup, uncheck the "extender 2.4ghz signal.
You'd still be able to use 2.4ghz as extender if you wanted, it just wouldn't use it as a failover option if the 5ghz was having issues.
How far from the router is the extender.
- I also want to mention that I lost the virtual MAC on my second Windows PC once. Typically I lose the virtual MAC for my Samba server, VPN server and second test server. First test server and main Windows PC never lost their virtual MAC. When I rolled back my firmware to 206, I lost the virtual MAC on everything but my 2 Windows PCs.
It's been almost 24 hours and everything is good but I've done nothing differently so I don't expect the issue to be resolved.
I'm going to try your suggestion since I don't care for the 2.5 backhaul. Router is broadcasting 5 GHz on channel 161. Extender is not located too far from the router. Directly through ceiling and walls, I would say about 3-4 meters max. Extender reports 780 Mbps currently and I've disabled the wifi being broadcast by the extender since I don't need that either. I'll make the changes today and report back in about 5 days. I always end up losing the virtual MACs within that time frame. I'm open to other ideas too.
I hope the chipset on my extender isn't faulty :(
