Orbi Router in AP mode (setting fixed IP address)

[Tuckerdude]

Hello everyone...

I'm running the Router in AP mode and mostly pleased with how it's all working. However, I would like to be able to set a fixed IP address for it so that I can always find it if I need to do some "admin" stuff on it.

The problem is that the Lan Setup portion of the interface is greyed out which I'm pretty sure is telling me that I have to be in Router mode to acess it. But before I go and make a bunch of changes, I just wanted to ask the following:

Is the fact that the router is in AP mode the reason that it "REQUIRES" DHCP? Meaning, you cannot have a fixed IP unless you are in Router Mode?

And FYI, I'm currently a COMCAST customer using a Business Class modem in my house, and it's using the 10.1.10.1 range of IP adresses and serving as the router for the entire house.

Any help or thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

[st_shaw]

You should be able to acheive what you want by setting a "reserved IP address" for the Orbi in your existing router's DHCP settings.  The Orbi will still receive the IP address via DHCP, but it will be the same address each time.  You will need to know the IP address of the Orbi to set this up in your router.

I'm not certain, but you might be able to set Orbi to a fixed IP in Router mode, then switch back to AP mode.  The above method is better though, because you control all your IP addresses from your existing router/DHCP server.

[Tuckerdude]

Hey St_shaw...thanks for the response!

I went to my routers web interface but could find no facility to do as you described. It's a Comcast Business Gateway (router) and there are limited options/features available to me.

Yeah, I thought about your second method as well, but thought I would ask this community first before going in a screwing up something. I'm also concerned that if I make changes to the IP address on the base, that then the Satellite won't see it anymore? I guess it would probably require me to "re-bind" them, but I guess I'm just paranoid.

[st_shaw]

It's possible the router doesn't have the feature.  That would be a pretty poor feature set though.

You will not screw up anything if all you do is change the IP address from DHCP to static. You can just set it to the same IP it's on now.  To be extra careful you could set the Orbi IP to be outside the DHCP range used by the Comcast Gateway. The default DHCP range is probably something like .10 to .199.  You should be able to find this in the Comcast GUI.

I don't think you will affect the Orbi base/sat connection.  That's done over the 5 GHz backhaul.

[Tuckerdude]

Ok, so I went ahead and did as st_shaw suggested and thought I would share my findings/results

1. Yes, you can take the router out of AP mode, put it into Router mode, and set a fixed IP address

2. But once I did this, I could no longer log into the router to make any changes or put it back into AP mode

3. I did an IP scan of my entire network as was able to see the newly assigned (and now fixed) IP address, but if I typed it into a web browser it would not bring up the web interface. It would just time out as if that IP address was not valid

4. The only way I was able to access it was to use the "www.orbilogin.com" method. This instantly brought up the interface as I was able to login. Oddly enough, once I was into the web interface I was able to see that it was indeed set to my new fixed IP address.

5. Not knowing what else to do, I changed the router back to AP mode and rebooted it. Upon restart, I was then able to type in the IP address directly into my browser and bring up the web interface with no issue.

A few side notes:

1. The "Orbi" app on my iphone had never worked (as in...I could not login) while my router was in AP mode. During the time between steps 2 and 5 (When in Router mode) I was able to FINALLY launch the Orbi app and see the router and my satellite and other network stats. But once I put it back into AP mode it stopped working again

2. The "Genie App" was the opposite....once I set my fixed IP address and rebooted the router in AP mode, the Genie App finally started working and gave me access to settings and controls.

3. Since there seems to be no way to access/set the Satellite's IP address, my guess is that it is always on DHCP? I'm not sure how much it matters, but it seems odd that there's no facility to do this.

At any rate, I am now back to having my router and satellite talking to each other, and my Wifi is back up and running as before. Thanks to st_shaw for his input...overall I'm still pretty happy with the ORBI, just  hope they keep working on it!

[Andres_Jose]

Here's what I did to my Orbi.

1. Open the GUI.

2. Go to Router/AP Mode.

3. Since Orbi is set to AP Mode, I select Router Mode then I select AP Mode again. I did not click Apply.

4. Now I have the option to set my Orbi to Static IP Address.

You do not need to click Apply. You just need to select Router Mode and then select AP Mode again. It will give you the option to set the device to DHCP or Static Ip.

[st_shaw]

Glad you get it setup.

It's not unusual to see connection problems when you change the address of a device you're connected to.  You might have been able to log in immediately if you closed the browser window and opened a new window to access Orbi.