Can Orbi be put into bridged mode?

[nickfloyd]

Hey All,

I currently have Netgear Nighthawk X8 Wireless Router with 5 x eeros (set to bridged mode - to avoid double NAT - so essentialy they act as wireless access points).

I have it setup this way because of the link aggregation offered by the Nighthawk X8 - my NAS is plugged directly into it using a ethernet bond.  So until these mesh technologies create a router that supports link aggregation / bonds I need to keep using my Nighthawk X8 + some sort of mesh to cover my house and workshop. 

Details - I am trying to cover about 4000sqft + house features are preventing line of sight and also have a tendency to degrate a wifi signal (i.e. my office is almost a faraday cage; when it was built it was covered in the radient barrior stuff to keep heat or cool in - this creates a crazy effect where wifi signals are "blocked" in an out - good for security bad for wifi ;).  I have run hard lines to solve that problem - but wireless devices are still impacted.

So here's the challange:

• eero setup works great because it allows me to set the primary node to bridged (good) and allows my Netgear to hand out IPs and it has a few parental features that are disabled because of it and I need about 5 nodes to cover my area (bad)
• Luma has good parental features (good) but does not support a bridged mode so I cant use ling aggregation on my Nighthawk X8 and I would need about 4-5 nodes to cover me (bad)
• Orbi seems to have the coverage thing licked (though I have never used one -yet) and I cannot find any information on parental controls or if the router can be made into an access point, i.e. bridged mode.

So my questions are:

1. Can the Orbi be put into bridged mode so that I can continue using my Nighthawk with link aggregation for my NAS
2. Is there a better way to set up my network? Like putting the Nighthawk into AP mode - I think I ran into issues with that with the eero because I could not change the default gateway so I effectively had 2 networks 192.168.1.x and 192.168.0.x (bad)

Any help / thougths would be appriciated!

Thanks!

[peteytesting · Accepted solution]

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@nickfloyd wrote:

Hey All,

So my questions are:

1. Can the Orbi be put into bridged mode so that I can continue using my Nighthawk with link aggregation for my NAS
2. Is there a better way to set up my network? Like putting the Nighthawk into AP mode - I think I ran into issues with that with the eero because I could not change the default gateway so I effectively had 2 networks 192.168.1.x and 192.168.0.x (bad)

Any help / thougths would be appriciated!

Thanks!

---

answers

Q1 . yes the orbi has AP mode for its router so you can run it the way you want to

q2. . no , use the Nighthawk as a router and the orbi in ap mode with its sat as the Nighthawk is a better router with more features

pete

[peteytesting · Accepted solution]

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@nickfloyd wrote:

Hey All,

So my questions are:

1. Can the Orbi be put into bridged mode so that I can continue using my Nighthawk with link aggregation for my NAS
2. Is there a better way to set up my network? Like putting the Nighthawk into AP mode - I think I ran into issues with that with the eero because I could not change the default gateway so I effectively had 2 networks 192.168.1.x and 192.168.0.x (bad)

Any help / thougths would be appriciated!

Thanks!

---

answers

Q1 . yes the orbi has AP mode for its router so you can run it the way you want to

q2. . no , use the Nighthawk as a router and the orbi in ap mode with its sat as the Nighthawk is a better router with more features

pete