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Forum Discussion
Mac address flipping on Orbi Satellites
I have the new Orbi RBR850 (AX-6000) with two satellites. I upgraded from the RBR50 as I had no issues with them. The new router was not cheap and it came at the cost of almost $1200.00 after few wee...
I see the exact same thing in my router logs, both satellites (RBS750) flipping macs back and forth from a netgear mac to an unassigned or make believe mac.
One satellite accounts for about 90% of the arp messages. As far as I can tell the Orbi system is working fine. I am in AP mode with an OPNsense router.
Ragar99 wrote:I see the exact same thing in my router logs, both satellites (RBS750) flipping macs back and forth from a netgear mac to an unassigned or make believe mac.
The "make believe" MAC addresses are reserved private MAC addresses.
They have started showing up with phones for aledged "improved security".
I've turned that functionality off on my mobile devices becuase I keep a table of MAC addresses of devices in my household so I can identify them.
Virtual Machines created on my NAS also use private MAC addresses which isn't suprising and works well.
Are you sure these private MAC addresses your seeing aren't actually from your local devices?
raven_au wrote:
Ragar99 wrote:I see the exact same thing in my router logs, both satellites (RBS750) flipping macs back and forth from a netgear mac to an unassigned or make believe mac.
The "make believe" MAC addresses are reserved private MAC addresses.
They have started showing up with phones for aledged "improved security".
I've turned that functionality off on my mobile devices becuase I keep a table of MAC addresses of devices in my household so I can identify them.
Virtual Machines created on my NAS also use private MAC addresses which isn't suprising and works well.
Are you sure these private MAC addresses your seeing aren't actually from your local devices?
Being in AP mode it might be MAC address proxying/forwarding in combination with ARP causing the flip flopping ... it might not be a real problem ...
I don't think I was clear, only two IPs flips MACs. Those IPs are of the two Orbi Satellites. Are you saying this is potentially caused by phones that are connected to them?
Ragar99 wrote:I don't think I was clear, only two IPs flips MACs. Those IPs are of the two Orbi Satellites. Are you saying this is potentially caused by phones that are connected to them?
More or less, yes, possibly.
Those private MAC addresses must be coming from somewhere and we know phones and some other cases use these private MAC addresses. I certainly was surprised when I started seeing them show up in my clients list since O know the MAC addresses of my devices.
We don't know how Orbi handles ARP, it's a pretty complicated situation if you think about what has to happen.
There are 4 MAC addresses involved, the source MAC, the MAC of the source side of the Orbi, the destination MAC address and the destination side MAC address of the Orbi.
If a device on one side of a satelite wants the IP address of a device on the other side of a satelite then the satelite needs to respond to the ARP request either with the IP address of the device on the other side or with it's own address if it's behaving like a proxy.
It's complicated by the presence of wireless too, I also don't know how that's handled, maybe the Orbi doesn't need to proxy or pass the ARP responses on becuase it's a wireless broadcast that can bee seen by the station that wants it, but that's questionable since a device on the other side of a satelite might be too far away to see the broadcast, so trying to work out if what your seeing is a problem, a bug, or just logging noise is hard to know.
We just don't know what happens with this and given the stellar Orbi firware it's quite possible there's a bug (or three) in there.
It's probably worth working out which devices on the network are usmg these MAC addresses if any ... just so you know.