Member Avatar for Lightninghawk

Any help that can be offered would be greatly appreciated. I just took on this account and all I want to do is rip everything down and re-wire it all with new equipment but they won't let me. I have attempted a diagram to show the current setup. Please see the attached image. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

So the current setup is the Comcast SMC Modem/Router is handling DHCP with an IP range of 192.168.1.3 - 192.168.1.179, but each linksys router is also handling it's own DHCP. Each Linksys has a static IP connection to the Comcast router with an IP of 192.168.1.180 or higher. Each Linksys is set up with it's own subnet of 192.168.10.1/ 11.1 / 12.1 etc.... They are each permitted to give out 200 IP's, The client lease time is currently set to 1 day.

The front office living area never has any problems with Wifi connections. My problem occurs with the guests. Many times instead of being assigned an IP properly they are assigned an IP of

IP 192.168.1.100 Subnet (correct) 255.255.255.0 but no Default Gateway. The IP could possibly be correct if coming off the Comcast Router DHCP, but this occurs on the Linksys routing as well. When it should be 192.168.10.100 or 192.168.11.100 etc...

Any thoughts or Ideas on this would be greatly appreciated. I just took over their account and it's a mess. Apparently this had been working up until a few months ago. When their In-House computer guy moved back home to India.

There is a password on all wifi connections. The SSIDs are all currently different. I currently set them to the room number they are closest to in an attempt to figure out where I was having connection problems, but it is apparently across all of them.

Would adjusting the client lease time help any?

hotel_diagram.jpg 325.91 KB
Edited by Lightninghawk
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Member Avatar for rubberman

Look at the Lynksys routers when this happens to see if they have exceeded their number of connections - they may not be relinquishing the connection in a timely manner. If this is the case, then you can try changing the lease time to say 12 hours. If one of the sub-routers runs out of available dhcp addresses, then the request would fall back to the Comcast router.

Another issue is where on each floor the router resides. It is possible that some rooms are not connecting to that floor's router, which could contribute to this problem.

Member Avatar for Lightninghawk

I will change the client lease time to 12 hours and see if that helps.

The issue of not connecting to the proper floor is a possibility, but using the different SSIDs has helped some. Though the problem still occurs if I am there when there is a complaint and I connect with my laptop.

Member Avatar for taichichuan

Actually, you should consider making the default lease time much shorter. More like 30 minutes. This does increase the number of lease renewals, but guarrantees that anyone who's not actively on the network gets their IP dropped for reuse by someone else.

Member Avatar for Lightninghawk

Thank you both. I moved it down to 6 hours and it helped some. Moving the lease time down to 30 minutes has shown a significant decrease in complaints about connectivity.

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