mesh networking (Huawei AX AX3000)

[Soogs]

I struggled a lot to start with getting the mesh going. I think I was trying to be to clever with settings, and got so annoyed that I just factory reset them all and followed the simplest instructions possible.

It worked straight away, even moreso when I redid it from scratch recently to have the quad core as main, it literally took minutes. So I'd encourage you to try again if you can bear to.

its not that i couldnt get it to work. i didnt work for my requirements. i need the ax3 that connects directly to my router to be in AP mode and the mesh doesnt work if thats the case. might give the mesh thing another go when im in a bigger place and have fttp. but for now im on a 5G connection and have another 5G failover so need to use my ERX and external modem setup.

 

[dl8860]

its not that i couldnt get it to work. i didnt work for my requirements. i need the ax3 that connects directly to my router to be in AP mode and the mesh doesnt work if thats the case. might give the mesh thing another go when im in a bigger place and have fttp. but for now im on a 5G connection and have another 5G failover so need to use my ERX and external modem setup.

Right sorry, fair enough. For my own understanding, what does AP mode offer compared to just having it plugged in as main router in mesh mode?

 

[Rilot]

Right sorry, fair enough. For my own understanding, what does AP mode offer compared to just having it plugged in as main router in mesh mode?

In AP mode the device is transparent as far as DHCP is concerned. All IPs are allocated by the main router.
If it's in router mode then it will allocate IPs and then route to the central router. This is fine as long as you don't want visibility of your device IP assignments from your main router. It does mean that devices on that router need to be on a different DHCP range - ideally a different subnet - to avoid overlaps.

 

[dl8860]

In AP mode the device is transparent as far as DHCP is concerned. All IPs are allocated by the main router.
If it's in router mode then it will allocate IPs and then route to the central router. This is fine as long as you don't want visibility of your device IP assignments from your main router. It does mean that devices on that router need to be on a different DHCP range - ideally a different subnet - to avoid overlaps.

Got you, thanks.

I've got my 'main' AX3 connected to my sky broadband router via ethernet. As far as I remember reading, the sky router can't be switched to 'modem only' mode, meaning I have both the sky router and my main AX3 with DHCP on, and therefore assigning IPs. Sometimes when one of my mesh nodes dropped out, after a bit it would then say 'IP configuration failure' or something like that on my phone when I tried to connect to it. Might that be something to do with this? I think someone advised a few months ago that I'd have something called 'double NAT' with this setup. I haven't had this issue since connecting the furthest node via WAN, but it has only been about 5 days.

I can see in my sky router settings under 'Advanced > LAN IP setup' that 'Use router as DHCP server' is ticked as ON. But something tells me turning that off won't go well...

 

[dl8860]

Anyone using these still? Recently swapped from Sky to BT for internet and TV. Internet all seems OK, to get some of the TV channels I have to turn on IPTV. Doing these seems to somehow limit the ability of the nodes to mesh properly. Still get internet connectivity from all of them, but the AI Life app goes funny, and chromecasts which are connected to two different nodes only show up pretty sporadically.

Turn IPTV off and all back to normal again. Can't be right can it?