Networking Sanity Check

Hi All,

I hoping someone can do a networking sanity check for me. I got a new router recently and I think I’m having some hardware or firmware issues with it, but after spending some time on the phone with support debating about how IP addresses work, I thought I should probably double check to see if I am the fool.

I have an ATT router currently setup for IP passthrough, and my new router is a netgear RAX45. Whenever I change the LAN IP and range of RAX45 from default 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.0.1, this causes the wireless of the router to become disabled (although web GUI shows enabled).

I’m looking for validation that because the netgear router is the DHCP server, I can set it to whatever local IP I want (within 192.168.x.x) without issues. Support was telling me that this would cause IP conflicts and that I need to talk to my ISP about this, but I was under the impression that I can setup my local network however I want, independent of ISP.

Sorry if this isn’t clear, please let me know if you have any questions.

  • What’s the IP address assigned to rax45 that ATT router will use to talk to it?
  • What’s the IP address of the ATT router?

Not quite.

Normally, a router would have a unique IP address on every interface it has, and all routers it’s connected to would have unique IPs from its own perspective.

So if ATT is 192.168.0.1 on RAX45’s WAN interface, then RAX45 can’t be 192.168.0.1 on its LAN interface.

[/caveat: actually, there’s multiple ways around this with PBR or source based routing, and subnet lengths, however, it’s a bad idea, it’s easier to just renumber the network.

The RAX45 is assigned the public IP of the ATT router.
I’m assuming that the IP address of the ATT router is also the public IP (at least on the WAN side). It also is assigned 192.168.2.254.

Yeah that makes sense that they can’t both have the same IP. But I figure things should be ok if ATT router is 192.168.2.254 and RAX45 is 192.168.0.1, right?

Thanks for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

What do you mean by ‘disabled’?

Are you still able to connect to the wifi, but unable to obtain an IP?
Are you still able to connect to the wifi and get an ip, but then you can’t reach any other part of the lan/the wan?
When you change the LAN settings, are you changing the DHCP server settings as well?
Did you enable the guest wifi network?

Long story short is that there was a firmware issue with the firmware version I was using. The wireless would be disabled (no longer appeared to be broadcasting wireless and router status showed wireless was off), but all of the settings to enable wifi were still enabled. The old firmware version I was using also wasn’t showing that new firmware was available. Resolution was to pull firmware from their website and manually update. In hindsight, I should have tried that sooner.

I figured the wireless issue was firmware or hardware, so I wasn’t expecting anyone here to resolve that, but someone from netgear support was telling me that I couldn’t change my local IP and that local IPs are assigned by ISP. They were also saying that you have to pay for static local IPs. I was just looking for some validation that I wasn’t a fool for objecting to what they were saying in regards to local IPs.

At this point, things on my end seem to be resolved and everything is working as expected. Just wanted to bounce some networking off folks to double check my sanity. Thank you!

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