Orbi DHCP Lease Time?

[w3wilkes]

With the Orbi system can I set the DHCP lease time? If not, this is a deal breaker!

[DarrenM]

I will have to check on this.

DarrenM

[TheEther]

Out of curiosity, why is this a deal breaker for you?  The XY Problem.

[DarrenM]

It does not have a DHCP lease time.

DarrenM

[w3wilkes]

I run a Windows Home Server 2011. The Bare metal restore doesn't handle DHCP lease renewel correctly and a Bare Metal Restore fails with Netgear's default 1 hour DHCP lease because a Bare Metal restore runs for more than 1 hour on any of my supported clients. The error after 1 hour of a Bare Metal restore is an "unknown network error". On my old DGND3700v1 the Netgear provided DHCP lease time is 1 hour and from what I've seen this has been the case on all the Netgear routers I've been aware of in the last few years. When I use a router that allows me to set the DHCP lease to a duration longer than a Bare Metal restore runs all is well. I do not believe that MS has fixed the Bare Metal restore TCP/IP stack in more recent server Bare Metal restore so it would not be worth it to upgrade my server as it currently does all I need.

In my case the XY problem doesn't apply. I know what the problem is and how to fix it and Netgear doesn't give me the flexibility to get around the problem MS is giving me.

[TheEther]

@DarrenM, what is the lease time provided by the Orbi?  If it's 1 day then, w3wilkes, your Bare metal restore process should be fine.

[w3wilkes]

As has been shown in other threads where there was a "belief" that Netgear DHCP lease time was 1 day vs 1 hour it is really 1 hour. Let's get some guarantee from Netgear of a 1 day DHCP lease on the Orbi platform. I would not want to go through the hassle of returning a device that wasn't able to meet my requirements.

https://community.netgear.com/t5/General-WiFi-Routers/changing-the-internal-dhcp-lease-time/td-p/100...

I will also note that even when an IP address is reserved/static the DHCP lease negotiation still occurs between the router and the client. In the case of the Bare Metal restore I refered to there is no ability to set a static IP on the client. I believe it is "best practice" that if a client has a static IP set that IP should be reserved to avoid the possibility of the client being offline and the router assigning that static IP to another client.

[TheEther]

I won't dispute that your DGNG3700v1 uses 1 hour leases, but my R7000 provides 1 day leases.  I notice that you tried @richud's custom firmware and it even provides 1 day leases (link), so that's an option.  I believe Netgear has moved to 1 day leases in routers newer than yours.  All we need is for Netgear to confirm or deny.

As to the "best practice", it's best practice to use static IP addresses that are outside of the DHCP pool of addresses managed by the DHCP server.  This avoids the need to set up a DHCP reservation.

[w3wilkes]

I do use @richuds firmware on my DGND3700v1 and it made this Netgear device usable in my environment. @Richuds firmware shows how great Netgear's firmware could have been if Netgear put the same flexibility and quality into their own firmware. However, this still doesn't provide an answer for my original question about the Orbi platform.

And again, the MS Bare Metal restore provides no capability to set a static IP so for my static devices I use both static and address reservation. This also provides a level of documentation on my network configuration.