I have a stumper of an issue for Jay and ANYONE ELSE who wants what I think may be an unusual situation…
I setup a pc configured with Proxmox VE on our home Fios network. Following Jay’s LearnLinux YouTube videos VERY CLOSELY, I restricted my network’s DHCP range just as he instructed & added my server to a static IP- all was well with my little server. At the same time, my wife’s WiFi connection thru a VPN to her job (previously working fine) started having problems connecting. After 1 week she could not connect at all. Initially we all thought it was a failed upgrade. Her helpdesk eventually said (after HOURS of testing) that we were losing IPv4 packets to every website (internal to their VPN & external to the internet) at a rate of 40%. They insisted we check with our ISP. Verizon (our ISP) said that since I restricted the DHCP range & assigned a static ip to a device they don’t support, I should RESET the router as they could not see any other issue.
Of course after resetting the router, everything worked fine. Barring this in mind, I have 2 questions-
Can static ip’s interfere with WiFi connections using the same router?
If I construct an independent network using another router, will it properly separate her WiFi/work connection from our house/server network even tho they will share our internet connection??
No, unless you got an IP conflict (i.e. 2 different hosts with the same IP on the same network).
Yes.
I suspect something else could be happening here to make the packets lost. Given how junk ISP routers are, could’ve been a buffer overflow somewhere. Did restarting the router, without resetting it do anything (if you tried that)? What was the IP range you configured in DHCP? What if you test it the other way around (say you reserved 2 to 100 for static IPs and 101 to 254 for the DHCP pool initially - you can test the DHCP pool from 2 to 150 and leave 151 to 254 for static addresses).
I doubt the ISP router supports this, but worth a shot. Can you check if you can do a DHCP binding on the proxmox wifi’s MAC Address? Worth a shot, could save you some headaches from making your own network (not that it’s a difficult task, just that you need to plan a little on equipment and potentially software to use).
I had to do what I HATE & just “Get it DONE!” for wifey’s work access. I ended up resetting the ISP router back to factory defaults without chasing down the actual issue & fixing it.
IP managers DO NOT mess with active routers too long; Wifey’s WiFi access IS my active router- I had to pull a trigger to get her up & running ASAP. (sigh!)
The good news is that I took the time to properly configure a 2 WiFi router setup using 2 Asus RT-AX3000 routers. My household is at peace with 1 network exclusively used by Wifey, 1 network used exclusively by Verizon (my ISP) for MoCA & the TV set top boxes, and 1 for my PCs, server, and whatever else I see fit! All separate and happy!
Now to figure out how a SMB share works…
LOL!!
Thanks for all your help & Inspiration!!
If you want to have it work for all devices on your network, including your wife’s laptop, you’ll need to put it in a network accessible by everything, meaning upstream, likely on the top network where the other 2 asus routers are getting their connection from (their WANs).
Samba is not exactly what I’d call user friendly, but it can be done pretty easily using stuff like OpenMediaVault. I started with it via the CLI, but I followed some random online tutorials, then read the manual and eventually I got to reconfigure an entire samba share properly (because the admins before me used symlinks to get around it, which caused issues like recursive folders for some shares).