Added Netgear router to my setup - curious results

[Preskitt.man]

I have a 2 node, wired AIMesh setup running Merlin 386.2_4. It has been (and is) working fine. I came into possession of a Netgear AX1800 router the other day. So to understand it better and possibly see the benefits/limitations of WiFi6, I set it up as a wired Access point on the network. So now setup is AC86U primary router. AC68U as Mesh node connected via ethernet directly to AC86U and AX1800 connected as AP via ethernet directly to AC86U. Different SSID's on the AX1800 than the AC's. Indeed, other than making it an AP, pretty much a vanilla setup. The only device I connected to the router was my Galaxy S20 and it does have the "6" symbol displayed by the WiFi.

The curious part is when I go into the Netgear utility and view connected devices, all the devices that are connected to the AC68U mesh node, mostly via WiFi show up as wired connections on the AX1800. ASUS interface still shows (as I would expect) all those devices connected to the AC68U. Just trying to understand. It is somewhat reminiscent of when I had the AC68U as an AP to the AC86U, they would show up on the 86U as wired connections, but at least then, there was a direct path from the device to the 68U to the 86U. No such path here. Nor do the devices directly connected to the 86U show up on the Netgear map.

 

[ColinTaylor]

I've never seen the Netgear utility you're referring to but from the sounds of it it's behaving more or less as I would expect. It knows what devices are connected to it wirelessly and so assumes everything else must be wired. The "other" network devices are just picked up from broadcast packets (e.g. ARP). That said, I don't know why it's not seeing devices connected to the 86U.

 

[Preskitt.man]

The utility is just the router webpage - similar in concept to ASUS Web Utility. What you say sort of makes sense. What it is not showing is are all the wireless devices connected to the 86U which I might expect by the same logic.

 

[ColinTaylor]

Are those WiFi devices connected to a guest SSID? That could be a reason.

If not, can you ping one of these WiFi devices from a client connected to Netgear? That might magically make it appear.

 

[Morris]

Your Asus router is simply a bridge in this case. bridges are learning devices and learn where a host is by sending traffic for a specific host out all ports and the listening to find out what port the host is on. Also, any time a host broadcasts rather than unicasts, its data goes out all ports. This is why your Netgear router in AP mode is learning of all the hosts on your network.

Morris