Connect AP to Media Bridge....Possible?

[jegesq]

Ok, I'm officially an idiot and have forgotten everything I once knew.

I have a media bridge set up in a downstairs room. MB is connected wirelessly to AC3200 on one of the 5ghz radios.

I want to avoid using another wireless router (an AC66U) in Repeater Mode, and instead thought about connecting it to the Media Bridge with the AC66U set in AP mode.

So I set the AC66U in AP mode. This theoretically is supposed to turn off DNS and DHCP in the AC66U, and it is supposed to get its IP address from the router (using the Media Bridge to pass through to the AC3200).

Except when I connect to the Media Bridge I can't get an IP from the router and the IP address that continues to be assigned to the AC66U is 192.168.1.1 (which is the actual gateway address of the AC3200). So it appears to be creating a double-NAT, or at least duplicating the AC3200's IP address and no proper IP address is assigned.

I've tried setting the AP with a different IP address, but still nothing. I tried connecting the AP to the Media Bridge going LAN to LAN (which is what I would think would work, since the AP should just be like any other device connected to the media bridge, right). I've tried AP LAN to MB WAN, AP WAN to MB WAN, in short, every combination, and noting works.

I'd like to take a deep breath and step back from this and ask for some help. Is what I'm trying to accomplish even possible (connecting AP to a Media Bridge, which theoretically should be just like connecting wired to the main router, since that's all the Media Bridge really does, i.e, extend one's wired network wirelessly).

Anyone have any suggestions, because I'm just stumped.

 

[MichaelCG]

You are correct in assuming the AP mode should disable all of the router features. I previously was using a N66U as just an AP and I plugged in LAN-to-LAN, it pulled an IP from DHCP from my firewall, and it worked like a champ.

However, I did attempt to connect an AP to my media bridge....and it never quite worked right. I have no idea why or what was wrong....it just didn't work as expected. I have never read up on the technical specifications on the media bridge mode to see if there was something in there that specifies that you can't do it. Or was it just some odd compatibility issue between my devices. I gave up and ended up moving to a different solution for my APs to improve my speeds and coverage.

 

[jegesq]

Well, as Emily Latella (the late Gilda Radner) used to say on SNL back in the 1970's...."Never mind."

As I said above, I'm an idiot, but not for the reasons in my first post. It's because I didn't first check to see if the Media Bridge was still connected or not to the AC3200 router.

After wasting several hours playing with settings on the AC66U, I decided to just call it a night. I then went to turn on a desktop computer that is (more or less) permanently connected to the Media Bridge, and that's when I discovered that the Media Bridge itself had apparently lost the wireless connection to the AC3200.

So, small wonder that the AC66U when set in AP mode couldn't get an IP address or connect to the internet from the Media Bridge. It was because the Media Bridge itself was not connected.

Solution: Reboot the Media Bridge, re-establish the wifi connection between it and the AC3200 router, re-connect the AP to the Media Bridge, and all is now working fine.

Yep, I'm officially an idiot.

 

[MichaelCG]

We are all officially idiots at some point in time.

I wish my media bridge was 100% stable as well. It is probably about 97% stable...but those 3% really happen at the worst time and never the first thing that comes to mind when other things are not behaving correctly.