35 wifi routers attached by LAN to one fibre WAN for hotel. Troubleshoot

[DennisFreud]

So yes, I have a fibre-router (in Spain, good service, 600MBit nominal and I will refer to this always as the fibre-router) and I have connected two chains of switches (distances between them are some 20-40 Meters) to two of the ports. Network is set to 192.168.172.x , 254 reserved for lan, only one for wifi but wifi disabled in the fiber-router. DHCP on.
Two chains means I have the fiber router located in the middle of the house and go from router to switch to switch to... from one port in one direction and the same from a second port in the other direction.

Each switch then feeds between 2 and 7 standard wifi routers (TP-Link in factory settings) plugged in to WAN port and so each apartment has its "own" router, password and can be client reset without influence on my setup.

Works like a charm EXCEPT, every once in a while somewhere near the end of the longer of the two legs the routers in the rooms don't get internet access anymore and I need to kind of reset some part of the chain but never seemingly the same parts. Means, I need to unplug some routers, reset some switches and the the error disappears.

Now my question, Is there a better setup?
Is there an Analysis tool (hardware, can be bought...)?
Could it be just sloppy cabling (I did all the cabling myself (manually made cables (CAT6))

Any help (not too technical please) appreciated.
Thanks
Dennis (from sunny Tenerife Island)

 

[coxhaus]

I think you are the only one to be a good judge for where the problems lie as you are the only one on site.

I don't think I would trust an ISP's router to handle DHCP. Are the wireless APs doing DHCP also or is it all in 1 scope in the ISP's router?

 

[DennisFreud]

Thanks for your reply.

The APs are doing DHCP (for their clients...)
As I see it the fibra-router distributes IPs to the APs (192.168.178.x). They to their clients on a different default (192.168.1.x) subnet.
I did not want to assign fixed IPs to the APs as they are stood in the apartments and some "smart" guests try a factory reset when internet fails and they will reset to default. So I configured the setup to work with APs in default config.

If they (APs) had fixed IPs I could run some IP scanner over the 192.168.178.x subnet to see which routers are alive by IP but since they are DHCP I need a tool which also shows the MAC.

So new question, is there a tool which scans all IPs in a given subnet and shows live agents and their MAC? I think that would help to troubleshoot.

 

[degrub]

Doesn’t your top level router have a dhcp assignment report ?
Or maybe it can email a log that can be parsed ?

 

[coxhaus]

Cisco small business Findit is software which tracks Cisco devices real time. If you use Cisco small business routers and switches and wireless.