Hi,
I have bought a Tenda MW12 Mesh system and I have had it running for a few months now.
It is working perfectly when it is in bridge mode and connected to my router. However in bridge mode the MW12 loses a lot of its features. Such as parental controls (which is one of the reasons why I bought it).
I want to put to put the MW12 in DHCP mode to get the MW12's features back. However when I put it in the MW12 in to DHCP mode I am getting some connection issues. I am guessing there is some conflict somewhere because my router is running DHCP as well?
I turned off DHCP on my router but I lost everything, the MW12 wasn't connecting to router.
What am I missing?
Thanks in advance,
Dave
Hi,
In most cases, the upstream router provides numerous services out of one box. It provides, routing services, NAT (network address translation) to give your network a private address, such as 192.168.3.x, and DHCP services to provide IP addresses to nodes (devices) on that network, DNS services, and also a acting as a hub (switch for LAN devices). But it doesn't have to provide all those things, and other devices can be added to extend the functionality.
If you have a router connected to your main internet feed, (i.e. the WAN), using those services if you place another router device, such as the Tenda MW12, MW3, MW5 etc, on the LAN side of your internet router, and leave DHCP turned on, you will be double NATting your network, which in most cases is not what you want, as NAT does create a slight performance hit on the network. In most cases you will want one of the routers, either your internet router or your primary Tenda to be in Bridged mode.
You could use the Tenda as the only internet router, however, you usually can't as more often than not, the ISP requires some form of authentication, from the internet router, and Tenda does not have those protocols to be used, plus the ISP might have provided the internet router as part of their setup and uses the router's MAC address as part of the authentication (and might have IP telephone service via a phone plug). So, if the main internet router does not provide all the services you would like, then you need to add (where possible) those services downstream.
In my particular case on my network I wanted specific DHCP services, (one was to give OpenDNS services to specific devices) Most lower cost routers do not have this. So in my case I have the ISP provided router with its DHCP server turned off (or greatly restricted with no pool of addresses to distribute), and its WiFi services turned off, I have an old router which was only 10/100Mbps (which is too slow for use as a router, and could not provide the ISP authentication, but which had a superb DHCP server, and also a VOIP server. Connected to one of the hub/switch LAN ports is my old router to serve as the DHCP server for the network, and the Tenda is connected to another (hub) port on the internet router. The Tenda is used in Bridged mode.
Bridge mode means that there is no tampering with the MAC address, IP addresses, but just allows all traffic on that device to flow through unaltered to the upstream internet router, and able to get network IP addresses from the old slow DHCP router, (the DHCP server hardly gets any traffic so it doesn't matter that it is old and clunky.)
The reason I use old clunky DHCP server, is that I can control the content my children can get. I can set up one or more services like OpenDNS so I can monitor and control which internet services they can access, so if they try to access dodgyservices.com the external DNS service will not provide the IP address back, to particular devices on my network. It is a free parental control service, in place of one on the router. It is not perfect, if my kids knew how they could use the local Hosts file on their device which gets interrogated before going out to the external DNS. On some external DNS services I can provide time of day management so, during (homeschool hours during the Covid pandemic) I can keep them away from games that I would normally allow them in non-school hours. DNS services can be free or paid for depending on what features you require. Another configuration for my DHCP server, is to only allow specific only specific devices access to my network, so if someone somehow got the WiFi password they would not be allocated an IP address.
You need to plan out which network devices are giving which network services and how they will get them. If you had two DHCP services running on a network managing an overlapping range of addresses, you might get duplicate IP addresses, which could either totally halt your network, or at best provide intermittent degraded services. So when you have multiple routers, you need to carefully plan how they work.
For a simple suggestion, use your main internet router to provide all the services it has, except WiFi, connect the Primary Tenda to one of its LAN ports, and set the Primary Tenda to Bridged mode, and if you cannot give out Host Options on the internet router's DHCP then use a software parental control software solution on each of the children's devices.
