WiFi Issues – ZTE MC801 – WAX204 – MR2200ac

Just a thought, as these are smart plugs is everything within the same electrical context?  i.e. no isolating circuit boards or the like in between the smart plug and the ‘wifi sender’ plug?

Wild thoughts again.

Is DHCP enabled on the pc networking?  If it is, is your router full up with unused IP addresses, Because I play with Raspberry Pis I find that I have to housekeep on my router now and then to delete shedloads of redundant IP addresses.

I do not know how Tasmota works, but I’d guess that on initiation it first looks for a spare DHCP address.

Dave can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression that the IP numbers dished out by the DHCP server are random within the allowed range. Mine seem to be all over the place, but the address space not only fills up with the PCs and IoT stuff, but every other bit of connected hardware grabs space and this sometimes grabs quite a lot of IP addresses. e.g. Sky box, Wifi extenders, visitor’s phones/pads etc etc. My BT Homehub does not seem to have any housekeeping system of its own. I do not know if my own housekeeping is necessary, but I like to keep an eye on things that connect to my system.

Incidentally the free version of Fing for the iPhone is a good way to look at your connections whether live or not.

ED – some are dished out randomly, some in order, but randomly makes more sense. You could expand the subnet to gain an extra 256 IPs. Change your subnet to 255.255.254.0, so your range would now be say 192.168.1.0 to 192.168.2.255, then expand the pool into it.

But you shouldn’t be running out of IP addresses so it’s probably the lease time. The default is usually 24 hours, but I’ve seen some a lot longer (and shorter). Try setting it to 6 hours. The IP address of a device won’t change unless it renews it outside of this time frame (it will try at half the time) and then only if something else has taken the IP.

So the request isn’t “can I have an IP address please”? it’s actually “can I continue using XYZ”? That’s why random lessens the chance of an IP address being used elsewhere, not that it really matters.

Drezha – welcome to the wacky world of WiFi. Your router shouldn’t be running out of ram to hold the NAT tables etc. which can happen with older routers and the new idea of connect everything including the kitchen sink. Neither should the WAX204 barf at that number of connections.

TBH I wouldn’t worry about the Zigbee and Synology interfering with each other and I think you should have a separate subnet for IoT devices if you can. The issue can be that the controller (an app on a phone or Alexa) has to be on the same SSID as the devices, which is the case with my TP-Link Tapo kit. You could however connect an Alexa to the same IoT network and it would still be able to access the internet.

I don’t think the WAX can do this for you; the Synology can but I believe only through the Guest network (I may be wrong). It’s a piece of pi$$ for Draytek and Ubiquiti though, even in combination.

Yep, Draytek and port VLANs are the simplest way to do it. Isolate the IoT subnet but allow the main subnet access to it.

You still have the issue of WiFi separation, but Draytek SSIDs are also part of the port VLAN matrix. So you could allocate subnet 1 to Port 1 and SSID 1 and subnet 2 to Port 2 and SSID 2.

This is my design for a customers home network to keep his work and home separate but all accessible by him. The secondary WiFi access point is a Draytek unit that is capable of Mesh with other Draytek units.

The matrix is quite easy, just associate a port or SSID with a VLAN and subnet.

Then you set up the interlan routing.

He has a Vigor2762ac but we haven’t added the secondary WiFi yet as his building extension is on indefinite hold. But adding them is easy, they just pick up the settings.