I just bought a Nighthawk AC1900 (EX7000) and cannot configure it as an access point as I cannot get access to the mywifiext.net web page during the setup procedure as described by the manual. My house has an Arris DG1670 cablemodem/wifi-router (Oceanic Time Warner) and I am trying to configure from a MacOS 10.11 wi-fi client. I have verified the Ethernet cable between the Arris and EX7000 by connecting my Mac to the Arris via that cable instead of the EX7000, and the cable is fine. I have noticed two possible problems during my attempted installation as folllows:
(1) The EX7000 manual states that when powering up the unit, the two wifi LEDs and the device-to-extender LED should turn amber for some period and then turn completely off. I should wait until then to make a wi-fi connection from my Mac to the EX7000, after which the device-to-extender LED will turn green. However, that LED turns from amber to green (after about 3 seconds) before I even make the wi-fi connection from my Mac, like it's already talking to something else. I have turned off every other wi-fi device in my house as far as I know, with the exception of the Arris and my Mac. My Mac's system preferences network panel shows the NETGEAR_EXT SSID, and I can turn on the Mac's wi-fi and 'connect' to the EX7000. (I am given an IP 192.168.0.5.) However, my Safari web browser will not load the mywifiext web page ('server not found'), or any other web page for that matter.
(2) The EX7000 documentation states that its web page can also be loaded by specifying its 192.168.1.250 address. But how can this possibly work when it has assigned a 192.168.0.5 address to my Mac? The Arris also assigns 192.168.0 DHCP addresses. I should note that as soon as I enable my Mac's wi-fi, it immediately connects by default directly to my Arris wi-fi net. I have to then select a new network SSID (NETGEAR_EXT) to switch to the EX7000. In both cases I am assigned the same 192.168.0.5 address which seems a bit suspicious. Does anyone know how to prevent my Mac from first connecting to the Arris?
I hope someone in this forum can help me, as I tried calling Netgear support last night using my free 90-day installation support and they were worse than useless. The first idiot I spoke with asked me to reset the device by holding the reset button for two minutes!!! (The manual says 5 seconds will suffice.) I think he wanted to make coffee. He couldn't help me, so my call was escalated to their 'access point expert'. This genius then insisted that an access point is configured by wiring my Mac to the EX7000 while the latter connects to my Arris over wi-fi. When I read her the section of the EX7000's own manual which tells you to cable the EX7000 to the router when using it as an access point, she hung up on me. I sure hope someone here knows more than these clowns, otherwise I'll be returning this thing to BestBuy!
Following up on my last message, I have had some success ... MAYBE! (I'll find out in about 10 hours from now, see below.)
I decided to re-try the access point setup procedure in a completely different environment by bringing the EX7000 into my office, thus removing the Arris cablemodem/wi-fi-router and any rogue wi-fi actors in or near my house from the picture. There is no cablemodem here at the office, just a private 192.168.168 LAN gatewayed onto a bigger public LAN via a D-Link DIR-655 which supports both wired and wi-fi private LAN connections. I wired the EX7000 to the D-Link (via some intermediate switches).
Initial power-up in my office was no more promising than at home -- again, the device-to-extender LED went green at the end of the EX7000 boot process before I even tried to connect to it from my Mac, just like it did at home. The manual says this should go green only AFTER you make the wi-fi connection from your client device.
However, and here's the big improvement, when I used the Mac network panel to connect to the newly advertised NETGEAR_EXT SSID at the office, I immediately got the Extender setup screen on my Mac as soon as the wi-fi connection was made (without even starting a web browser). This time, unlike my home experience, my Mac was assigned a 192.168.1 address. Curiously, mywifiext.net was still unreachable from the browser, but this time when I tried to connect to 192.168.1.250 through the browser it worked.
So, I went through the access point setup screens, and all seemed to go well (although it took a rather long time to save my settings to the device). At some point my Mac was booted from the wi-fi connection, probably when the EX7000 reconfigured itself, but I was able to quickly re-connect over one of the two wi-fi nets now advertised by the EX7000 post-reconfig. The only thing that failed was a final (maybe?) web browser page that could no longer be displayed due to the new IP address of the EX7000 -- I got the message "Safari can't open the page 192.168.1.250/IA_review_setting.htm because Safari cannot connect to the server 192.168.1.250". Beats me why Netgear would even try to display such a page given that the reconfiguration will change the EX7000's IP, but whatever. Hopefully there were no further steps to the access point configuration, though -- at least my Mac is still connected over one of the access point's new wi-fi nets and all seems normal.
Now, I just have to take this thing back home in about 10 hours and hope there's nothing peculiar to the access point settings configured at my office which will not translate to my home environment. I entered no such info myself during the config process (I only named the two wi-fi nets and set their passwords), but I suppose it's possible that the EX7000 may have grabbed other data all on its own from my office LAN (e.g., network number or gateway IP) and cached it away to break things when I move to another network. Any guesses on what might happen when I do that (or why I was not able to get this far at home last night, following the exact same procedure)?
Final followup (I hope): all is good, my in-office config of the EX7000 also worked when I moved it back home again.
I'm not entirely sure what the takeaway of this episode is -- something on my home network interfered with the access point configuration, but I still don't know what and do not have the time to investigate. My suspicion is that maybe my Arris cablemodem/wi-fi-router had something to do with it, but that's unclear. If I was to do all this over again, I would probably just cable the EX7000 to a dumb switch connected to nothing else in my house, and try to do the access point configuration in that extremely stripped-down environment. That might work unless the EX7000 actually needs to see the outside world during the access point setup for some reason.
