Disable auto change IP address

I think most of those quotes were from my post, not garrettg84.  (He is a lot more sophisticated than I am.)

The key (to me) is that his Orbi is NOT doing what we all say it should be doing.  i.e. He has set the Orbi to router mode, and has set the LAN port of his Orbi to 10.99.99.1 and gives out DHCP addresses in 10.99.99.x.  What seems to happen is that once a month the Orbi decides to change the LAN side to random IP's, and even seems to put itself into bridge mode and give the public IP to its LAN interface.  Since we all agree, "this CAN'T HAPPEN", then the Orbi software is broken.  (I have long believed that there are some pointers loose in their implementation of OpenWRT that eventually overwrite something critical.)  My experience has been that simply restarting Orbi does not "fix" whatever has gone wrong.

I agree with the sentiment that cable modems should not be powered off.  However, they do get powered off when there are general power outages and my ubee cable modem has to be power cycled when the telephone service goes funky.  (I can hear callers, but they cannot hear me.  They get frustrated and hang up.  Only restarting the modem fixes it.)  No matter.  I believe cable modems are designed to allow rebooting as often as a person wants.  Otherwise, cable companies would be flooded with calls every time someone hits their circuit breaker, there's a power outage, a cord gets pulled out, etc.