Assisting my son with configuring his home/office network with newly acquired Balance Once.
The home/office network consists of at least 50 devices, maybe more. I want to try and bring some rhyme & reason to the network & segregate the office portion of the network, from the home side & group the devices by type within a range of IP addresses.
The prior network was all in the range of 192.168.1.1-254. As devices were added to the network,DHCP assigned an IP address. None of the devices had a DHCP reservation. There is a mix of âstuffâ on the network (you name the device, itâs probably on the network, watches, phones, NAS, iPads, PCâs, MACs. switches, APs & other crap) When I replaced the older router with a Balance Once, everything was connected & working with IP addresses. There is sufficient Ethernet cabling, switches, & APâs to segregate the devices into several VLANs.
So far, I have segregated the office devices from the home devices. However when I look as the client list, I see a device I have put on a 2nd VLAN in both locations. For example (this is only an example), I see the device by MAC address at 192.168.1.114 as well as 192.168.2.3. Itâs actually connected on 192.168.2.3 according to the client list.
How do I release the lease on 192.168.1.114 within the UI?
The 2nd part of my dilemma. I want to group all similar devices into a range of IP addresses within a VLAN. As an example, there may be 10 media devices, I want to put in a VLAN dedicated to media. I know how to assign the new IP address, but, how do I get the Balance Once to release the old IP address? Ideally, I assign the device an IP address on the applicable VLAN & release the IP address from where it came from. The exercise is over & done with.
In reading the forum, I sort of get the idea the old lease IP address just expires & drops off the client list on expiration some time later. Due to the number of devices I am dealing with, that seems sort of dull The client list will get huge while Iâm waiting for the old leases to expire.
Granted, Iâm sort of new to this stuff & suspect I botched the terminology. What am I missing?
Appreciate any feed back. Thanks in advance for any help or assistance.
Filter the client list by âOnlineâ devices only? Technically they are still there, but you wonât see them anymore.
Another option would be to setup all of your devices the way you want them - static IP assignment, DHCP lease reservations, etc. - make a backup of your Balance config, restore back to defaults, then re-apply the config. This should get rid of old leases and only show current addresses.
I hope you have better luck isolating your media devices than I did. Most everything is discovered via local lan only using UDP discovery. I ended up with my wifi clients not being able to discovery the media devices and ended up bringing them back together on the main lan. This is more of a limitation in the actual client/device since they control the TTL for the discovery packets.
Thanks for your response, but, Iâm a little confused on where you are going with it.
Iâm sort of a newbie & Iâm looking for a simple way to release IP addresses so they can be reassigned in either the untagged lan or a VLAN. Iâve already isolated & moved the devices from the untagged lan over to a VLAN. Now I want to reserve IP addresses for specific devices.
All the devices moved to the VLAN seem to be functioning & they are isolated from the untagged lan. Some are hardwired, some are WiFi. As indicated, there are âbunchesâ of devices & I used media devices as a grouping example where I would assign IP addresses in a range of IP addresses, I could have just as easily have specified printers, scanners, cameras or any group of similar devices.
Unplugging cables, recycling devices, lease expiration,etc. seems to be a somewhat primitive way to accomplish the task & turns out to be a hit & miss process for me so farâŚ
Surely there must be a better way.
If there is - I donât know it. You could set your DHCP lease timeout to be ridiculously short while things are âin flightâ (being moved to permanent location), and then extend it when everything is where it belongs. That should prune the âimproperâ address quicker. But, no - to my knowledge, there is no way to remove a DHCP lease from the Peplink side other than to wait for it to pass the expiration time and be pruned naturally.
Perhaps a feature request thread would be appropriate? I was just trying to provide some workarounds for having to wait.
Thanks for the response & trying to help
Iâve been partially successful by messing with cables or recycling (power on/off) devices. Seems to work sometimes & not others.
Can you elaborate a little more regarding your media devices as I donât seem to be having any issues⌠so far? Of course working for a few days does not mean that it wonât fail in the future if there are issues Iâve not yet encountered.
Just devices not showing up in their respective apps. Most of these devices expect the client (usually the phone/iPad) to be on the same network subnet as itself. I had issues with DirectTV app not recognizing my DVR. The XBox app couldnât automatically find my consoles. My harmony remote app wouldnât discover my remote controls, etc. Basically, anything that required SSDP via UDP multicast groups wouldnât work.
Just for clarification - we are talking multiple VLans and not multiple subnets right? I believe they added the ability to have multiple physical LANs and layer 2 packet handling will still work. i.e. You can have a 192.168.1.0/24 and a 10.0.0.1/24 going through the same switch and packets will get to their destinations. This assumes that address distribution is handled via static addresses for one of the LANs.
Just to remind you⌠Iâm a newbie. I know you are talking about protocols when you say UDP & SSDP. Other than that, I am at a loss to understand your point.
We eliminated satellite TV service some time ago & use a combination of online services to stream media to TV (Tablo for OTA, Roku as the interface for other TV programs, & a NAS with Plex for recorded movies). There is also a variety of other things Peletons, iPads, phones, watches, Alexa, cameras, & God know what else. As the stuff was acquired, it was most likely added to the network via plug & play.
In all honesty, he doesnât even know what some of the stuff is, so Iâve blocked the MAC idâs until we can determine what it is.
Iâm segregating a home office from the residential portion of the house. So far this has been relatively easy as there are enough available Ethernet cables, switches, patch panels & what have you to accomplish this by segregating âstuffâ to a port on the Balance One and designating it as a VLAN. I want to refine it a bit further.
The daughter in law & the grandson are heavy users of iPads, iPhones, MACs, Chromebooks & stuff of that nature. If they werenât working, Iâm sure I would have been taken to task by now.
Itâs been a learning experience.
Well sir, for a ânewbieâ - it sounds like you have a pretty complex environment with lots of different devices and vendors. Your idea of grouping devices to networks and then plumbing them into the Peplink and marking it all as VLan will work, it will most likely be just a few more cables. VLans were meant to have multiple segmented networks âvirtuallyâ by âtaggingâ traffic at the source and then keeping it segmented throughout the entire network. i.e. One set of hardware (and wires), many ânetworksâ. Most switches honor VLan tagging by at the very least âpassingâ the tagged packets through untouched. âSmart Switchesâ are the switches that are able to tag traffic on the way in (and sometimes on the way out). It really is pretty cool, but the outcome is exactly what you are setting out to do. Honestly, those âsmart switchesâ are so expensive for simply isolating layer 2 traffic that you may come out a bit ahead money wise with your approach. It most definitely is more easily conceptualized since you have physical hardware and links.
My mention on the media devices was not concerning the streaming devices being able to access the internet. My issues were more with my âGuest network couldnât connect to the Yamaha amplifierâ - they couldnât output their pandora stream from their phone to the amplifier and surround sound. Since Peplink implemented the Bonjour service forwarding (basically apple specific SSDP discovery/handshake stuff) - I have been able to work around the majority of headaches by simply allowing traffic to the âApple TV Device Groupâ (thanks for the custom groups Peplink) and enabling the Bonjour service forwarding between the two networks. Sorry android folks.
SSDP is just a set of query/response commands for clients to âdiscoverâ applicable devices. Some apps allow you to specify the IP of the device you want to connect to, but some are reliant upon successful âauto-discoveryâ. Most home/consumer networks are assumed to be a flat /24 in the 192.168.0.0 space, so app developers program their discoveries with a TTL of 1, so the router cannot forward the packet beyond the local LAN. LAN->VLan is technically a router hop.
Good luck in your quest. I am sure you can get to where you are going, and reach out to the forum if anything comes up â good people try to be helpful.
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