Why is there no DHCP Lease settings on a $200+ top tear router?

[Girl1der]

I need a Router with a DHCP Less time setting, I'm going to have to sell my R7000 or custom flash it becase a DHCP Lease time of 24hrs is a Very very short sighted setting. This setting causes 10's of 100's of 1000's of people grief every year with their home and small business networks. 

Examples of issues:

#1 (I've made lots of money on this one)  Home network and small businees networks cannot print or find ip based network devices when they shut down for a week for vacations because they are setup with the IP they had at the time!

#2. People who like to save energy ofter turn off their home network printers when not needed, if the printer is setup by IP address by the automated software, its screwed when you turn it on a week or 4weeks later when you need it. Most people reinstall the printer ending up with two and a large headache. This isn't limited to printers, but printer make up the most common network item turned off, I know of file servers that power down any time the company has a shut down longer then 3 days. 

#3. A DHCP of 72hrs is the best over all lease time. This allows for machines to be powered down over the weekend, which for small businesses in Hot climates is often required. 

Now if your a over zellous control freak and only share a block of 10 IP's, for the DHCP server, then thats your own fault. 

So without having to hard code every device on your network, or Add a extra running machine dedicated to providing the DHCP leasing... Adjusting the lease time is the best for the Envirment (polution & energy & longivity wise) and provides a more stable home network! If Netgear wants to provide the best, then they need to step up and stop some of the limited thinking and allow people to set their own DHCP lease times.

Please provide the ability to adjust my lease time on my r7000 router! 

-- Disapointed with Neatgear! 😞  

[Retired_Member · Accepted solution]

The wheels on the Bus go round and round.................

[microchip8]

Don't spend your time on this. NETGEAR's engineering virtually never listens and implements what people report or require. The only thing that will happen with your request is this:

1) it will get noticed by a community support member from NETGEAR

2) it will get passed on

3) Engineers will probably look at it and the chance is good they'll dismiss or forget about it

I've dealt with NETGEAR support and requests quite a few times myself and none of what I reported or requested got implemented. The only reasons why I'm using NETGEAR routers is that they a) have a decent build quality and b) they allow me to run third-party FW without too much effort. If one of the two wasn't met, I'll probably never consider NETGEAR again

[Retired_Member]

 address resevations wouldn't work?

[microchip8]

@Retired_Member

still no excuse for not providing a basic networking feature. While it may be a work-around, I agree with the OP for not providing it

[VE6CGX]

Issue could be not the lease time duration.  Lease should be renewed periodically  B4 running out(expiring).  I think it is the job of firmware.  Usually any where from 30mins B4 time expiry it should be continously renewed at set interval. If lease time is set shorter than renewal interval, that'll be a probem for sure.

[netwrks]

Asus doesn't provide it either. Mostly 3rd party., Printers, Server's, networking devices (router's switches) should be set up with static IP's. Work stations DHCP.  Network Management 101. 

[Girl1der]

99% of people don't know how to use it.
They don't hard code their IP's for all their static devices, and they just want to do the plug and play thing. For proper plug n play support dhcp settings are important.

[Girl1der]

Most people and allot of cheap half-ass technicians never hard code anything. So being able to set the DHCP to something like 10days is completely valid and awesome!!

[Wolf_666]

At the moment, choosing a consumer product like R7000 is only to have the really basic features, hardware is fine.

If you want something more advanced you need to go to 3rd party firmaware (some of them buggy, I have tested all), if you want to got to Pro products better stick on x86 platform and pfSense (or other Firewall/Router OS).

If you need detailed LAN segmentations, VLANS, Guest LANS you need to go to Pro AP (Ubiquity) and managed Switch (i.e. top: Cisco SG300).

What I really don't understand is why Netgear is unable to balance consumer features with some few Pro features.

For istance, implement VLAN support, let's say, 4-8 VLANS in the firmware of R7000 (a $200 unit) is a minimum requirement. Implement some advanced switching features as well, without hurting the Netgear Switch offer.

The R7000 has a great hardware, make available some features (available with 3rd party FW) is the minimum to get the loyal customer happy and get their fidelity.

I use Netgear products since decades, I have been also a Beta tester

The complexity of my Home LAN has raised up, I need segmentation (few VLANS, 4 to be precise) for guests, I need reliable switching feature (Cisco SG300), I need reliable and powerful firewall (pfSense). I am going to buy an ubiquiti UniFi AC Pro (proper VLAN support at a really good price, 150€) to get the proper Wi-Fi segmentation via VLANs.

I am not talking of a corporate office, I have a lot of wired units (TV, Gaming consoles, Cameras etc), tens of Wireless Clients and you must manage them in a semi-professional way, you need semi-pro hardware.

Said that my R7000 will continue to be a dumb AP in a secondary area of my house.....

[VE6CGX]

Hard code Ip address? You mean editing nvram or Kernel? What is so important about

lease time? How to renew it B4 expiring is important which is the job of f/w.

[VE6CGX]

Majority crowd has problem even properly using basic vanilla router  like R7000 and  how are they going to use pro level stuff? They have some learning curve involved, no more PnP.

[TheEther]

Having more control is usually a good thing but the reasons given so far for the ability to change the lease time don't look very compelling.

A really long lease time of 10 days is potentially going to cause DHCP address pool exhaustion in an environment where a lot of unique devices come and go.  Think guests with smartphones.  Maybe OP's environment(s) don't have this risk but it still seems ill-advised to increase the lease time for all devices for the sake of a printer.

The lease is still going to be lost on the 11th day.  The printer that was shut off for 4 weeks is still hosed.

The lease is going to be lost whenever the router is rebooted.

Netgear routers have a limit of 32 clients per Wi-Fi band.  Too many long-lived leases may result in hitting this limit.

A static IP address or DHCP address reservation is a much better solution than globally increasing the lease time for all devices.  It's a point solution to a point problem.  Also, I'm skeptical of the argument that 99% of the people don't know how to use them.  By this same argument, people won't know how to set a DHCP lease time.

Finally, people really should not be accessing printers by a fixed IP address.  Network printers almost universally support Windows Printer Sharing and are, therefore, accessible by name.  Many also are reachable through their mDNS (called Bonjour by Apple) name.   Windows, OSX, iOS, Android and Linux can access printers by their Windows name.

[Retired_Member · Accepted solution]

The wheels on the Bus go round and round.................

[VE6CGX]

Simply if one uses something (s)he should know how to use it.  It is sad many does not know or understand what is going on, driving a car, using a router, setting up a remote control for their home theater, programming a thermostat at home, etc.,etc. They don't want to learn either. Just like only wanting to know an answer on a math problem not figuring out how to arrive at the answer. More so for younger generation. I still use slide rule for quick calculations, etc. Today's bank tellers, they are dead without calculators.

[VE6CGX]

I often use ip addresses for id. purposes. When I look at the address I know what the device is, like Canon printer, Brother printer or ip camera, NAS, etc. What is wrong with that when you say "shouldn't use assigned ip address"?

[TheEther]

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@VE6CGX wrote:

I often use ip addresses for id. purposes. When I look at the address I know what the device is, like Canon printer, Brother printer or ip camera, NAS, etc. What is wrong with that when you say "shouldn't use assigned ip address"?

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There is nothing wrong, per se.  Humans are just better at remembering names than numbers.  It's one of the reasons why DNS exists.  It's easier to remember community.netgear.com versus 208.74.205.20 (yes, this is this forum's real IP address) or ipv6.google.com versus 2607:f8b0:4005:806::200e.  Wouldn't you prefer to refer to your devices by name (e.g. "Canon", "Brother", "KitchenCam", "NAS")?  

The other benefit of using a name is that the address can change and it wouldn't matter.  Computers can handle it transparently, unless you go out of your way to hard code addresses.

Sure, it's not that hard to remember a few IPv4 addresses that differ only in the last quad.  What are you going to do when IPv6 becomes mainstream and we rid ourselves of NAT?  Although DHCPv6 exists, it's more common for devices to autocalculate their own address based on their MAC address.  You're better off by not clinging onto IPv4 addresses as a crutch.

[Girl1der]

Everyone missed the point, being able to set a deco lease time is helpful for those privat home networks and small businesses who don't let everyone use their network. I've seen the Windows print service & bonjour be less reliable then Windows Millienium!

In fact many of the home and small business printer setup disks have historically setup the network printer using the IP address without you realizing it. When the printer stops working most consumers pop the disk back in and rerun the install to get it working. Both Dell and HP tech support advise these types of actions in trouble shooting.

But my complaint is, why does my $50 router have this basic feature and my 200+ router does not? It seams lame and is an example of some stupid programmers who never have to actually work with normal none techie humans to fix things. So they think it's not needed.

FYI ^5 to the guy who posted the solution!!!