BT Wholehome Premium with Zen internet Fritz!Box 7530 - DHCP Broken

[JEB2]

Hello,

I have 3 x Wholehome Premium Discs on latest stable firmware (SGAB205018)

With the Fritz!box running it's default DHCP configuration the discs fail to work.

First disc gets a DHCP address, however any device connecting to the Wholehome SSID cannot get a DHCP address from the router.  Additional discs also fail to get an address.

(DHCP  via a LAN port or Fritz!box onboard Wifi works just fine)

Disabling the Fritz!box dhcp server and replacing with a Raspberry Pi runnig DHCP plugged into one of the Fritz!box lan ports solves the problem. I believe the issue may be related to the discs rewriting the DHCP request.

I would prefer not to have the additional raspberry Pi - it could be used for much more interesting things 🙂 

Has anyone got Wholehome working with a Fritz!box router?

Thanks,

Jon

[simonrandall]

Hi Jon,

I've just tried the exact thing you have today, I even upgraded the firmware on the Fritzbox and it still wasn't giving out addresses to the additional Whole Home Discs, or any devices connected to the BT WholeHome SSID.

If you get any response from elsewhere, then please let me know and I'll do likewise.

Thanks,

Simon

[PinkSquirrel]

'Has anyone got Wholehome working with a Fritz!box router?'

The older WholeHome disks work fine with my Fritz!Box 7530. 

[Paragbatavia]

I’ve got the standard whole home discs which are 2 years old, just moved to Zen and all working fine,

[JEB2]

Does the client get it's DNS server set to the IP address of one of the discs? 

I suspect the issue may be caused by the discs either acting as a DHCP relay agent, or re-writing the DHCP packets on the fly.

A network capture shows this sequence of events:

The client device sends a DHCP Discover.

The Fritzbox responds with an Offer 

The client makes a request.

The Fritzbox never sends an ack. 

Client continues to send request packets.

[simonrandall]

Unfortunately not my Zen setup so not had an opportunity to use them on it again.

Have switched them to a client using BT Broadband, and they work well as expected.

Would still be very interested if anyone gets WholeHome Premium discs working on Zen Fritzbox 7530.

[CJTURNPIKE]

DHCP is definitely broken in this firmware release.  I returned mine having plucked my eyes out trying to make them behave properely. The only way in the end, was to Manually assign my edge router gateway on each AP as its default gateway, and assign IPs to each client manually then in my test it worked.  The APP never worked at all to complete the setup on these discs. 

Id setup 4 other wholehome (previous GEN ac) and they are behaved and installed as expected and dished out DHCP with correct config.

The Premium Wholehome was hijacking the DHCP and changing the default gateway to be ITS own IP rather than the actual DG of my edge router which meant clients could not connect to the gateway / internet at all.

Having read a million other complaints regarding these, I decided to return them.  Shame as they are good value compared to other WIFI6 options, and the AC units were ace.