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Orbi WiFi 7 RBE973
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EX6400 - all connected devices have the exact same virtual MAC address - normal?

DeepFry
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EX6400 - all connected devices have the exact same virtual MAC address - normal?

I have been in contact with Netgear tech support for a little more than a week now trying to resolve this issue. Before that I naturally searched and read through similar issue reported on community forum but unfortunately none of the customers who reported seeing the same thing have posted any resolution. Seems to me that they reached a dead end and eventually resorted to buying another brand or had no choice but to live with the problem.

 

By now I have already gone through many different steps with tech support and reflashed the firmware to almost all available versions one after another, doing factory reset and then reconfiguring from scrach but alas the end result is still the same.

 

The weird thing is that devices connected to the EX6400 seem to work just fine even though they appear to have the exact same virutual MAC address as displayed on the EX6400 as well as on my main router, i.e. they each received a unique IP address somehow. Neverthess, as one may have guessed already, IP address reservation and MAC filtering will not work on the main router since these devices all have the same virtual MAC address. See attached screen-shot from Netgear genie on EX6400 (last octet B1/B2 depends on whether the client is connected to the 2.4GHz or 5GHz band but you can see duplicates within each band). Another major problem is that this duplicate virtual MAC address appears to be confusing my main router and now I have to power-cycle the main router at least once a day since I have the EX6400 up and running, otherwise the main router will simply stop functioning and lose connectivity to my cable modem.

 

I'm posting the issue here as a last hope to see if there is anybody out there who had the same issue and was able to resolve the issue because I have a feeling that Netgear tech support has no idea what they are doing and just asking me to perform random steps hoping that the issue will magically disappear by itself.

Model: EX6400|AC1900 WiFi Mesh Extender Essentials Edition
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