Having issues w/ setting up a dual roaming wifi network

Question

Level 1

11 points

Having issues w/ setting up a dual roaming wifi network

I'm trying to set up a secondary Wifi network in my home for my tenants to be able to access the internet through, but I have been having issues w/ the routers losing connection and no longer broadcasting a wifi signal.

The setup is as picture below

The top level airport extreme has cat6 cables going into the WAN ports of the next airport extremes, which each then using the LAN1 ports to connect into the next routers in the chains. The airport express in this image has since been replaced with another Airport Extreme.

Each of the routers below the top level is set to Bridged mode.

The middle layer of routers is set to have the same network name and password as the top level one to create my personal roaming network.

The bottom layer has a different name, but are both named the same to try and create another roaming network.

What I can't figure out is why the routers on the secondary network keeps dropping it's wifi connection? I need to power them down and restart them for the Wifi to come back up.

I tried to set each of them to have a Guest Network w/ the same name, but for some reason I couldn't connect to it.

Any help/advise is greatly appreciated!

VIN,AirPort Extreme 802.11n (4th Gen), iOS 10, null

Posted on Sep 25, 2016 8:14 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Sep 25, 2016 10:20 PM in response to o0FlipZ0o

Use all LAN ports not WAN.. in all the bridged airport extremes.

And use static IP on all of them. Set this via the Internet tab of each one.. and to really get it working properly setup corresponding DHCP reservation in the main router Extreme.

How old are the Extremes? They don't last forever? If you have a mix of models tell us which model is giving you trouble.

Reply

Answer 2

o0FlipZ0o Author

Level 1

11 points

Sep 26, 2016 6:48 AM in response to LaPastenague

Great thanks! I'll give that a try w/ setting static IPs on the Extreme's.

For setting the DHCP reservations, which MAC address would I use? The ethernet or one of the wireless addresses?

As for the mix of models, there's the newest one, a 5th gen, a 4th gen, and two 2nd gens. I hadn't noticed any issues with the 2nd gens until I added the 5th & 4th gen's to my network to try and create this 2nd wifi network.

Reply

Answer 3

Sep 26, 2016 2:24 PM in response to o0FlipZ0o

For setting the DHCP reservations, which MAC address would I use? The ethernet or one of the wireless addresses?

Since you are connecting by ethernet you use the Ethernet MAC address.

The reservation is not entirely necessary.. it is simply good practice.. as a router with a static IP can take some time to appear in another router and much modern networking is strongly linked to dhcp tables. In other words we have simply found using both works best.

As for the mix of models, there's the newest one, a 5th gen, a 4th gen, and two 2nd gens. I hadn't noticed any issues with the 2nd gens until I added the 5th & 4th gen's to my network to try and create this 2nd wifi network.

The Gen2 are 8 years old now.. give or take a year.

I know you can update them all to 7.6.7 I am not convinced they work great with that level firmware. If you still have issues once you have tried all the static IP.. then I do think replacement is in order. Even if you pick up some second hand gen5 they are a huge improvement router over the Gen2. (which are gen1 with gigabit).

Reply

Answer 4

o0FlipZ0o Author

Level 1

11 points

Sep 27, 2016 12:36 PM in response to LaPastenague

Thanks again for all the help!

I've done as suggested, but I was still experiencing some issues w/ the AE's designated for my suite losing connectivity. I found another post on here suggesting to turn the IPv6 to be "local-link only", so I did that as well and it appears to have been stable now for the past 4 hours w/o any drops. Fingers crossed that it remains stable!

Reply