2 DSL connections, 2 routers, 1 LAN.. and some intermittent weirdness

[LJSeinfeld]

Scenario:
The only broadband available to my home is crummy 6mbit down/768kbit up Frontier DSL. If I'm doing anything else on the internet durning gaming, the gaming sucks. I have installed an additional DSL connection that I use primarily for gaming. It is installed near my entertainment center. The gaming router is bridged, and the routing is being handled by a Netgear XR500 with DumaOS

I also have my 'main' connection (another DSL modem) set up in another room. This modem is also bridged and routing is being handled by an Asus RTN66U running latest (as of today) MerlinWRT firmware.

All devices are on the same LAN subnet so the TV, ShieldTV, XBOX, Receiver, computers, printers, phones, yada are all reachable from the LAN. DHCP is only enabled on the Main router, and I do manual assignments for things that get to use the Gaming router. Example: Main router is 192.168.11.1, Gaming router is 192.168.11.2 and I use 192.168.11.2 as the gateway for my xbox/whatever else I decide to use it, with a manual IP assignment to the device that I'm relegating to the Gaming router.
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Everything has been working swimmingly. Until the last few days. When I noticed I couldn't reach a network printer, I looked at my WIFI connection on my laptop and noticed it showed I had an IP address that looked to be assigned by Frontier... routable to the internet. I looked at other WIFI devices and saw the same thing (unique addresses on each, but none of them my LAN schema.. routable WAN addresses).

A reboot of one or both modem/router combos seems to clear this up... for awhile.

I am so confused... How could any device behind a router, much less all of them, be given an address outside of the DHCP pool / a WAN address?

 

[ColinTaylor]

You don't say the model of DSL routers, but I would double-check that the wireless is turned off on both of them (assuming they have wireless). Perhaps they have reverted to a non-bridged setup for some reason (remote firmware update?). Regardless, also change the SSID's on those routers to be something different from your Netgear and Asus routers.

 

[LJSeinfeld]

You don't say the model of DSL routers, but I would double-check that the wireless is turned off on both of them (assuming they have wireless). Perhaps they have reverted to a non-bridged setup for some reason (remote firmware update?). Regardless, also change the SSID's on those routers to be something different from your Netgear and Asus routers.

Main is a Westell 327W
Gaming is a Netgear D2200D

I am not using the wifi on either of them (I use the routers mentioned before) There is a known issue with the d2200d that causes problems if the wifi is turned off --so it's on, but no SSID broadcast and no devices has ever been set up to connect to it.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I would be suspicious of the Netgear then. After all, it has to be getting the Frontier IP address from somewhere, which logically means a device directly connected to the Frontier network.

This page for the Netgear talks about it being "N300 dual band concurrent" and "Private and public WiFi access". This makes me think that it might be operating as an "open" public Wi-Fi hotspot. It's possible that devices (like Windows 10 for example) will automatically connect to such hotspots.

Try using a Wi-Fi analyser app on your phone/laptop to detect all Wi-Fi networks. It should be fairly obvious from the detected signal strength and MAC addresses which SSID's are coming from your equipment.

 

[roguetr]

Sounds like you're bridging your wifi devices directly to Frontier's network, assuming the IPs are theirs (do a whois on the IP range to confirm). Strange they don't prevent/limit something like that.

Sniffing the wifi packets will let you identify the BSSIDs of each access point and which client is connected to which.

If it's not as simple as you connecting to a bridged device over wifi, you'll have to investigate further because any answer would be a complete assumption.

*Also confirm the DHCP server address and ownership.

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