RT-N66U Merlin: suddenly ignoring assigned IPs?

[project86]

My N66U was humming along perfectly for many months, then after a power outage it came back with some odd behavior. I'm using Merlin, was a few FW behind but just updates to the latest and it hasn't helped.

I have most of my significant networked appliances using reserved/manually assigned IP addresses. I go to LAN, then DHCP, then manually assign what I need. The network streamer, the NAS, the Music Server, Roku, Blu-Ray, iPad, Android, etc, all labeled for easy tracking. This eliminated problems I was having early on with IP conflicts. It worked great until today.... when the router started ignoring just a few of my reservations and assigning totally different IP addresses.

For example, my music server has 192.168.1.165 reserved. But the router assigned it to 192.165.1.124 for no apparent reason. No big deal, except I have software set up to control it on half a dozen tablet/PCs around the house. So I'll have to go in and change all those, with no assurances it won't just mess up again tomorrow.

Even worse: my NAS is reserved at 192.168.1.9, but the N66U assigned it as 192.168.1.161 which happens to be the same as my wireless printer. Now I can't even log in to the NAS.

Why oh why did it decide to throw out new addresses on just a few devices? Everything else is the same. And why would it pick a duplicate address while ignoring a perfectly good reservation? Any help would be appreciated.

 

[project86]

So I got it partially figured out. The music server is attached to a wireless bridge, and I turned that off, reset the router, waited for it to come all the way back up, then turned the bridge back on. I can see on the Merlin status page it initially gives the wrong IP then quickly switches to the prearranged setting. Perfect.

However, the NAS is still troublesome. I switched the LAN cable to port #2 (my Asustor NAS has dual Ethernet) and it gave me a new IP address - this time without conflicting with my printer. So it works, technically, but is still ignoring the original reservation. Still wondering why it might do that.

 

[RMerlin]

Quite often, devices behind a bridge will have their MACs masqueraded as that of the bridge from your router's point of view. That might be why you aren't able to allocate DHCP leases through reservations.