First off, I’m a home user. I know the difference between 586A and B and that you can’t punch-down stranded cable into a solid-wire jack but the limits of my network knowledge aren’t much further out than that.
I have a strange thing going on with my home network. I have a Raspberry Pi running OctoPi attached to my 3d printer. But I can only login to the OctoPrint server when I’m connected to the wifi access point that the Pi is connected to.
In the “house” part of my network, the connections are like this
AT&T Fiber router (wifi turned off) → Unifi POE Switch → two Unifi AP Lites.
The “garage” end of the house where my 3d printer is was having wifi issues so I connected an old Asus AC1900 router (DHCP turned off, acting as an AP only) through the house wiring. This is also connected to the Unifi switch. All the wifi access points (Unifi and Asus) have the same SSID and password.
When I’m in the “Unifi Wifi” end of the house, I can’t connect to my OctoPrint server using its IP address. I can move my phone/computer into the room where my Pi is and refresh its IP address and the OctoPrint login page appears, I can login and mess with my printer.
In the “Asus Wifi” end of the house, OctoPi is able to connect to the Internet via WiFi and download updates. Other wireless devices in the same room are able to connect to the outside Internet at large.
This used to work fine but I think it was before I stuck the Asus AP in the mix. The Pi wasn’t having connection issues, it was some devices a little farther away from the closest Unifi AP. It’s been a few months since I decided to worry about this later - later is here.
Is there something in the Unifi controller software that could be blocking my Pi serving up its login / status page? Or is this not a Unifi issue at all?
Easy solution (probably) - buy another Unifi AP for the garage. Trying to put that off if possible.
I’m going to try moving the connection to the Asus AP to a port on a different switch or directly into the router. If that doesn’t work, I’m stumped.
I’ve had this happen with some routers used in this fashion for one reason or another.
Based on your description this seems like a case where consumer router not meant for AP mode doesn’t handle ARP/STP/whatever layer2 protocol well with other switches for whatever reason. Typically this is because the unit is still assuming it will have .1 because, as consumer gear, they make a lot of assumptions and the switches to change things in the settings often don’t really turn anything off (this is what made the WPS fiasco far worse when it was broken. The switch in settings just made it not visible, but it was still there are running).
Are you actually getting a different address? If you are that indicates DHCP is likely not turned off like it should be.
If two servers are running, or if the consumer is holding a shadow IP that matches the AT&T device, you would have a race condition in the ARP responses.
Additionally, for clarity’s sake, the Asus device is connected via a LAN port and not the WAN port, connect? If not there’s your problem but based on the level of knowledge demonstrated I’m assuming it’s on the LAN, but I’ve made that silly mistake myself a few times.
First things first, check your channel usage - since you’re using the same SSIDs and passwords, be sure you don’t have channel collision in the bands you’re running in.
Second, is the ATT box acting as your DHCP agent and router? You might have a lease problem - see if you can staticIP instead of trying to use DHCP.
Third, what Unifi controller are you using? A cloud key?
I’ll check the channel usage too - hadn’t thought of that. Yes, the AT&T Fiber “gateway” is acting as DHCP server and router, but the wifi is off. I’m not using a cloud key, just using the Unifi Controller app.
Update: @hon1nbo@bknapp
I logged into my AT&T gateway and had it “forget” all devices and rescan. Also logged into all the APs to set 2.4Ghz channels - the Unifi APs are on 1 and 11 and the ASUS router is on 6.
Those things seem to have done the trick, I can check my Octoprint server from anywhere in the house, the driveway cameras and the garage door MyQ thingy still work. Win-Win.
