Trying to get around ASUS Router Limitations

[LighthammerX]

Greetings,

I have a bit of a weird problem I am trying to resolve.

I'm working on building out my smart home with all the smart things and to keep it all sorted for sanity and potential troubleshooting, I've been making dang sure to assign everything to IP pools via the DHCP.

I'm running an ASUS RT-AC3100 (Merlin firmware) as my main router with an ASUS AX3100 (Default ASUS Firmware, up to date) and a ASUS AX5400 (Default ASUS Firmware, up to date) building out my AiMesh.

To manage the DHCP, I'm using the YazDHCP addon on my RT-AC3100.

With all the IPs I have assigned to smart devices, I believe I am having issues with devices trying to use the AIMesh. The RT-AC3100 is receiving most, if not all of wireless traffic.

I've tried binding some devices to AIMesh Nodes but it won't let me because I have too many things assigned to the DHCP.

I think I could clear the DHCP table, add the AIMesh Node Bindings then readd the DHCP tablefrom YazDHCP; but I am looking for a less hacky solution to run my DHCP with the sublet pools I like to keep things organized but be able to force IP Bindings.

I believe my problem comes back to I need a better DHCP solution and wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts on how I could shift the DHCP duties to another device.

I'm not really sure how to force the network to follow a DHCP with this router setup.

Thanks in advance.

 

[bbunge]

The mesh system should not be dependent on the DHCP from your AC3100. One easy way is to set up a Pi-Hole and let it do DHCP and turn off the DHCP in the AC3100. Any client that connects to a mesh node will get its IP address from the Pi-Hole. Even the mesh nodes should get addresses from the Pi-Hole. You can set up Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for an affordable pirce and it will be able to do add/malware and etc. blocking as well. If you have an old PC you can set that up with Linux and run DHCP or Pi-Hole but the Raspberry Pi would use less energy.

 

[cptnoblivious]

The mesh system should not be dependent on the DHCP from your AC3100. One easy way is to set up a Pi-Hole and let it do DHCP and turn off the DHCP in the AC3100. Any client that connects to a mesh node will get its IP address from the Pi-Hole. Even the mesh nodes should get addresses from the Pi-Hole. You can set up Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for an affordable pirce and it will be able to do add/malware and etc. blocking as well. If you have an old PC you can set that up with Linux and run DHCP or Pi-Hole but the Raspberry Pi would use less energy.

Just to add, it also runs well in a small Ubuntu VM (1GB RAM is plenty).

 

[LighthammerX]

The mesh system should not be dependent on the DHCP from your AC3100. One easy way is to set up a Pi-Hole and let it do DHCP and turn off the DHCP in the AC3100. Any client that connects to a mesh node will get its IP address from the Pi-Hole. Even the mesh nodes should get addresses from the Pi-Hole. You can set up Pi-Hole on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ for an affordable pirce and it will be able to do add/malware and etc. blocking as well. If you have an old PC you can set that up with Linux and run DHCP or Pi-Hole but the Raspberry Pi would use less energy.

I was kind of thinking along these lines after I wrote the post (sometimes writing a problem out helps you sort things out in your head, you know?)

I have a small Zotac mini box laying around and have been toiling with repurposing it as a DHCP server and placing it between the router and the cable modem.

I was considering trying this (RouterOS):

MikroTik

MikroTik makes networking hardware and software, which is used in nearly all countries of the world. Our mission is to make existing Internet technologies faster, more powerful and affordable to wider range of users.

mikrotik.com

I havent toiled with this yet. I guess technically I could do it easily on Ubuntu and it would give me a reason force me to tinker with it. I just have to make sure it doesn't turn into the bottle neck.

Thanks for the responses.