Quick overview of my setup before I carry on with the problem, and what fixed the issue (configuration, more on that later).
I have an AX88U which is my primary router, and an older AC68U. I recently dabbled with the idea of putting all my IOT devices onto the guest network and limit access to the intranet (I don't trust them, and nobody should!). I'd configured the guest network with rate limiting to 2mbps down and 2mbps up. This all worked great.
I then added my AC68U, and everything was working just fine.
On the intranet (wired), I have a raspberry pi which runs pihole for network wide ad blocking.
My thought was to use the raspberry PI's wifi as one of the DNS responder interfaces, but I came to the realisation that peers on the guest network cannot access each other, I suppose this is by design, and an acceptable security implementation, so I was running out of ideas of how to get a pi-hole on the guest wifi.
I then had the great idea to have the router, as part of DHCP advertise itself as a DNS resolver, using the checkbox "Advertise router's IP in addition to user-specified DNS", and then also, under the WAN settings, UNCHECK "Connect to DNS Server automatically". I then specified my PI-Hole on the LAN side as the DNS resolver, and this worked like a charm. Sure, I was seeing the router itself as the source of the query, but I could correlate that query to the QOS/Web History just fine.
Here's where things started to go wrong. My router then lost connection to the AI Mesh node. Not a problem I thought, I'll just go through the setup process and add it back in. I tried this, maybe half a dozen times, no dice. It just wasn't having it. In the logs, I could see that the routers were wirelessly associating with each other, just not finishing the DHCP request when going through the setup process.
*See logs attached to this post at this point*
So, it was a bit of a long-winded troubleshooting session for myself, but I thought it might be useful for anyone else running a similar setup.
As a side note, would this be considered a bug that could be fixed, as I believe that the router will fail to add mesh nodes if it doesn't advertise itself and use auto DNS from WAN.
Granted, this is a very limited and specific use case, so chances of it being fixed are slim.
I have an AX88U which is my primary router, and an older AC68U. I recently dabbled with the idea of putting all my IOT devices onto the guest network and limit access to the intranet (I don't trust them, and nobody should!). I'd configured the guest network with rate limiting to 2mbps down and 2mbps up. This all worked great.
I then added my AC68U, and everything was working just fine.
On the intranet (wired), I have a raspberry pi which runs pihole for network wide ad blocking.
My thought was to use the raspberry PI's wifi as one of the DNS responder interfaces, but I came to the realisation that peers on the guest network cannot access each other, I suppose this is by design, and an acceptable security implementation, so I was running out of ideas of how to get a pi-hole on the guest wifi.
I then had the great idea to have the router, as part of DHCP advertise itself as a DNS resolver, using the checkbox "Advertise router's IP in addition to user-specified DNS", and then also, under the WAN settings, UNCHECK "Connect to DNS Server automatically". I then specified my PI-Hole on the LAN side as the DNS resolver, and this worked like a charm. Sure, I was seeing the router itself as the source of the query, but I could correlate that query to the QOS/Web History just fine.
Here's where things started to go wrong. My router then lost connection to the AI Mesh node. Not a problem I thought, I'll just go through the setup process and add it back in. I tried this, maybe half a dozen times, no dice. It just wasn't having it. In the logs, I could see that the routers were wirelessly associating with each other, just not finishing the DHCP request when going through the setup process.
*See logs attached to this post at this point*
So, it was a bit of a long-winded troubleshooting session for myself, but I thought it might be useful for anyone else running a similar setup.
As a side note, would this be considered a bug that could be fixed, as I believe that the router will fail to add mesh nodes if it doesn't advertise itself and use auto DNS from WAN.
Granted, this is a very limited and specific use case, so chances of it being fixed are slim.
