Advice for AIMesh Placement with AC3100 and Lyra Trio

[Peter Near]

Looking for opinions on placement changes for my newly ordered Trio setup.

Three-story home (basement, ground, upper) with 1/4 acre pie-shaped back yard. Wireless devices pretty much everywhere in the home and back yard.

Current: AC-3100 located centrally on the ground floor, old original AC66U in upstairs bedroom, another original AC66U in the back yard in a shed. AC3100 as the router, 66U's set up as access points, all wired. Original idea: Cover as much as possible with the AC3100, and have the 66U's fill in any gaps. Coverage, real-world connectivity and speeds are all good.

Equipment upgrade: The back yard 66U is starting to go, it gets pretty severe conditions -20C in the winter to +40C in the summer so I'm not surprised it's dying. Decided to get something relatively capable but cheap from ASUS, and will switch the whole network over to AIMesh management. A three-pack of Lyra Trios is on its way from Amazon.

Potential Change: Most of my equipment is in the basement (cable modem, primary ethernet switch, NAS, etc) and I'm wondering if I should move the AC3100 down into the basement. The only reason the 3100 is on the main floor is for wifi coverage, naturally it makes more sense in the basement with the other gear. I'm thinking of moving it down there, then having the Lyra Trios as wired AIMesh access points cover main floor, upstairs bedrooms, and back yard as they seem fairly capable on paper as access points. Realistically, wifi devices will connect via the Lyras 90% of the time with this placement and rarely to the 3100.

Question: Good idea, or am I being stupid to move my "best" wifi router into the corner of the basement? I feel like this forum will tell me if my baby is ugly before implementing the change.

Thanks!

 

[Grisu]

why not putting it down to basement?
Much more importend would be how your nodes will be connected, via LAN (good) or Wifi (somehow suboptimal)?

 

[Peter Near]

Yes the nodes will all be wired.

 

[Grisu]

So dont think a lot, just spread them over your home and go on.

 

[Peter Near]

Thanks, will do.

 

[Peter Near]

Well that didn’t go as expected!

Long story short - the 3100 and Lyra trios just don’t want to work together in AIMesh mode. Constant disconnects, I tried all the advice and settings on the forums to no avail. After several resets and various attempts while the family gave me disapproving looks for the crime of no internet, I put the Lyras all into AP mode and they’re now working well.

Anyone have tips for loading all four routers into the ASUS Router app to simplify firmware updates? I can only get one at a time when they are sharing the same SSID.

 

[Grisu]

you can reach each with its IP
In AP-mode I wouldn't care much about regular updates, look once a year is more than enough.

When in Aimesh-mode did you change Aimesh-backhaul to LAN (not auto or Wifi)

And for testing you could connect only one Lyra via Aimesh, that one only you will use and wont effect your family.
Are they all on latest firmware, 3100-master you can use recent Merlin 384.13 with Aimesh support and Lyra-nodes run with stock.

 

[Peter Near]

Yep, Ethernet backhaul was set to preferred. Beam forming, mimo, fairness , roaming assist all off. Reset everything a few times, even tried to isolate lyras in case there was a bad one. All behaved the same - strong signal and then client just disconnects with no log entry to give any clue as to why. Similar behaviour on multiple clients MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Roku TV.

I’ve bookmarked the IP address of the lyras for future maintenance. Fun fact - the main aimesh router hides former aimesh nodes from the dhcp table, so that made it fun to find the IP addresses of the APs. For future reference, rebooting the primary router fixes that behaviour.

 

[OzarkEdge]

Yep, Ethernet backhaul was set to preferred. Beam forming, mimo, fairness , roaming assist all off. Reset everything a few times, even tried to isolate lyras in case there was a bad one. All behaved the same - strong signal and then client just disconnects with no log entry to give any clue as to why. Similar behaviour on multiple clients MacBook, iPad, iPhone, and Roku TV.

I’ve bookmarked the IP address of the lyras for future maintenance. Fun fact - the main aimesh router hides former aimesh nodes from the dhcp table, so that made it fun to find the IP addresses of the APs. For future reference, rebooting the primary router fixes that behaviour.

Maybe just try the Lyra AiMesh without the 3100 (and leave Roaming Assistant enabled since it's suppose to mesh the network).

OE

 

[Peter Near]

Update for adding AP-mode routers to the Asus Router app. Under "Insights" it will detect that there are other routers on the network, click on the option there to add the access points one by one to the app. They will then appear under the hamburger menu and you can flip between routers.