GT-AX11000 with RT-AX86U repeater

[rustyshackleford]

I used to have a RT-AX86U, where everything connected great from the garage but my upstairs did not connect as well on video calls. A few months ago I swapped routers to an GT-AX11000 and now upstairs gets fantastic connection but in the garage, my PC does not even see any of my Wifi networks at all. A Raspberry Pi in the garage does connect to my 2.4 network but it is spotty at best. My guess is that my old PC doesn't have new enough Wifi hardware to connect to the new router, or something.

I just set up the RT-AX86U in Repeater mode in the garage and connected the PC to it via Ethernet, and I'm getting fast internet now on the PC. The trouble is that I cannot find any clients connected to the RT-AX86U when I go to router.asus.com OR to repeater.asus.com. The UI for both URLs shows GT-AX11000 at the top and the network map only lists clients directly connected to that router. The PC, and my laptop connected to the repeater do not show up yet both are clearly connected to the internet. This is a problem because I need to find the IP address of the Pi connected to the repeater so that I can log into it, but can't see it in the map. Is there any way to see the devices connected to the repeater either through router.asus.com or some other method?

By the way, I did turn off wifi on my laptop and connect to the repeater via ethernet, but even in that case router.asus.com and repeater.asus.com both route to the main GT-AX11000 UI screen with the main network map.

 

[tgl]

The first thing I'd try is making the RT-AX86U be an AIMesh node instead of an independently-configured repeater. It may be that that has more downsides than upsides, but if it works smoothly for you I think it should have fewer glitches like this one.

If you do need to run it as a repeater, the thing to do to manage it would be to figure out what is its IP address (probably the GT-AX11000 is assigning that) and then connect to it by that numeric address instead of using any aliases like router.asus.com.

 

[rustyshackleford]

Thanks for the response. My understanding of AiMesh is that when used with a tri-band router, one of the 5hz bands gets reserved for backhaul. I'd like to keep the 3 bands available as separate networks if at all possible.

I've tried each of the IP addresses on the main router, but none are the repeater.

 

[tgl]

Thanks for the response. My understanding of AiMesh is that when used with a tri-band router, one of the 5hz bands gets reserved for backhaul.

Wait ... are you running the RT-AX86U with wired backhaul? I assumed from your description it was wireless. If it is wireless backhaul, I don't think I agree with your opinion that reserving a band for the backhaul is a bad idea.

 

[rustyshackleford]

No, it is all wireless. The only thing happening in the garage is a 3D printer running on a Pi4 and occasionally the PC to stream music. I have many devices in the rest of the house that are now working across the 3 bands off the main router and I'd rather not impact those devices in any way just for the garage stuff to work a little faster. I really just need the Pi and the PC to connect reliably, but I do not care much about speed as very little is happening with those 2 devices.

 

[tgl]

Got it. Slightly off-topic: Pi4 has an ethernet port I believe, so you should consider hard-wiring it to the RT-AX86U and then running the RT-AX86U in media-bridge mode not repeater mode. This is unlikely to change much about the immediate problem; but it gets the RT-AX86U out of the business of broadcasting an SSID, which you'd just as soon it not do if your main focus is on the wireless devices upstairs.

As for the immediate problem ... the RT-AX86U certainly has an IP address, and I do not think it'd work at all if that address isn't inside what the GT-AX11000 thinks is its local LAN address range. So I'm going to bet you just didn't search that range fully. Also, it seems possible that the RT-AX86U is set up to only accept admin connections from one port or the other (that is, either over-the-air from a client of the GT-AX11000, or locally from a hard-wired client). You can fix that if it's not to your liking, but you have to get into the device first, so try searching the address range from both sides.

If that seems too tedious, you could consider hard-resetting the RT-AX86U, reconfiguring from scratch, and making sure you give it a hand-assigned IP address along the way.

 

[rustyshackleford]

I did go through all of the clients except the ones that are named/known computers. There are only 11 in total on the list. Of the ones I did not recognize, one ended up being my paper printer (had no idea it had an admin console you could log into!) and the rest did not connect. I'm 100% certain the repeater did not show up in the list, or else I was not able to connect to it by entering the IP in my browser.

I like the idea of the hard reset and choosing an IP manually. Currently I'm trying to install my 3D printer's software on an old laptop that does connect to the main router without a problem in the garage. If I can get that to work, then I can replace the Pi and the Desktop in the garage and not need the repeater at all. If it doesn't work I'll try these other options that you've shared. Thank you for your help!